It took me some time to get this started, but finally, I have some working code and a web site for the project.
This project provides a collection of some (hopefully useful) OSGi bundles/components. I’ve recently added the ServiceCollector, an (often) easier to use alternative to the OSGi’s Service Tracker and some bundles for bridging to/from OSGi logging:
The basic idea of this project is to provide something similar to the Circuits Framework for Java. After successfully using the core library for some time now, I’ve decided to finally release an 1.0 version.
I got destracted, and – as several times before – started a search for UML tools. This time, I came across PlantUML and liked it. I also found pegdown-doclet that allows you to use PlantUML in your javadoc and provides support for using Markdown. Why did I never think of this before? What a great idea!
I immediately got some ideas about extending the support for PlantUML. But I didn’t like that the doclet mixes the Markdown feature with the PlantUML support. And pegdown is deprecated, so I didn’t want to build on it. So I decided to restructure the doclet. The Markdown support is now provided by MDoclet, based on flexmark-java and without any dependency on PlantUML. The PlantUML support is provided by the plantuml-taglet which can be used independently, i.e. with the standard doclet as well as with MDoclet.
This took longer than expected, so the new PlantUML features will have to wait a bit, but I now have a good starting point.
During the development of JGrapes the
need for an HTTP codec arose that could convert data from and to
java.nio.Buffers. As the solution has no dependencies on the JGrapes
framework, it was factored out in
this project
as an independently usable component.
For the nth time I tried to do something with OSGi. And again I found all the “hands on” introductions rather difficult. They all start with a lot of “install this and that”, “click here and there”. But all you really need to get started is basic knowledge of the JDK. If this is your starting point, and you want to get a first “hands on” experience with what OSGi is about, have a look at my introduction into the topic.
Many people’s starter into the world of hardware hacking used to be the AVR microcontrollers. Today, small ARM starter boards are a lot cheaper. But if you want to understand what happens in a microcontroller, something simpler such as the AVRs is still your best choice.
There is a project “AVR Plugin for Eclipse” that makes programming AVRs with Eclipse real fun. However, I found it to be in a kind of “intermediate state” lately. That’s why I started my fork on GitHub, thus trying to keep this plugin useable for me and for others.