deephacks

Tools4j-config is in steady progress but there are still a lots and lots of ideas and functionality to be implemented. At the moment i am working mostly on integration with OSGi and Eclipse RCP/SWT which have been very time-consuming since I havent had any past hands-on experience.

I spend roughly 20h a week on the project and it can be quite exhausting to be honest, especially since I do this on my own. There is a lot more involved than just happy hacking. I need to do field research, take notes, learn new technologies, write documentation and examples, testing, release management and of course think long and hard about purpose, goals, design and conceptual integrity etc.

It is very easy to get carried away into one direction and then accidently neglect the rest. But one good thing about having a tight time-account is that I have gotten (even more) obsessed about my productivity. Good tools truly are a key ingredient in the software development soup.

But the hardest part is the lack of feedback. I have only myself to trust that the project is going in the right direction which can be a bit demoralizing sometimes. I have to tell myself to stay focused, have patience and work hard. However, no users means that the project can change easily, but I cross my fingers that the open source community gradually will begin support me with feedback in the future.

It is not all about wanting success. The project is of course also a very stimulating and fun hobby. I love programming and this something that I wanted to do for a long time. I did not anticipate the great feeling of freedom that allow me to take my time to do stuff right. Very refreshing! I have also stopped watching all that junk on TV and doing mindless website surfing. There is still time over for friends, training and work. Blogging maybe not so much, eh?

Anyway, there is now also a logo for tools4j-config to give the project some identity and style.

I knew I wanted something fresh that would not invite old-fashioned hierarchical thinking into mind. With the logo I have tried capture what I think configuration management is all about: decentralized, autonomous and organic patterns that tell how small pieces connect together to make a whole.

The picture was bought from www.shutterstock.com for a few dollars then resized, some text added, convert to png using GIMP and Voila!

What do you think?

I am proud to announce my open-source project tools4j-config; a project that will try to address configuration concerns in Java once and for all.

I have seen and heard about far too many projects that handle configuration carelessly, causing endless headaches when put into production. Some notable nuisance are non-uniform interfaces, unmanageable structural and data changes in disparate sources, diffuse configuration intents and correlation to system concepts and lack of documentation.

Tools4j-config is my reaction from scratching an itch trying to help developers, operators and administrators (devops) to cooperatively manage configuration. This is the starting point and an honest attempt to try implement a framework that handle these concerns in a simple, productive, uniform, extendible and portable way.

The mission statement and motivation for tools4j-config is taken from the announcement on freecode.com and goes something like this.

Tools4j-config support long-running enterprise Java applications with a framework for handling configuration changes without restarting themselves.

It also aids in developing applications which are decoupled from knowing how and where to store, retrieve, and validate configurations.

The aim is to liberate applications to use configurations seamlessly on the terms of their particular environment, without constraining them to Java SE, EE, OSGi, Spring, CDI, or any other programming model or framework.

Tools4j-config is a true open source project, contributing ideas or criticism on any collaborative level is highly appreciated and will never be neglected or considered too small. Committers are welcomed with open arms.

The information on tools4j-config is presentable but a bit scarce at the moment but will build up gradually towards a 1.0 release.

• Documentation HTML, PDF
• API javadoc
• License
• Version Control
• Bug Tracking
• Wiki
• User Mailing List – tools4j-user@googlegroups.com
• Dev Mailing List – tools4j-dev@googlegroups.com
• Blog

Sure been a long time coming but expect a lot more on the topic of Configuration Management from me this year