JAU (Java Annotation Based Utilities) announcement

I am glad to announce a first stable beta ;-) of the JAU library (http://code.google.com/p/jau/). Version 0.6 implements the following methods using annotations (and works for POJOs):

• equals
• hashCode
• toString
• compareTo
• copy/clone
• toMap/fromMap (this one creates a java.util.Map with object properties as entries)

Here is a sample use case:

import com.googlecode.jau.*;

@JAUEquals

@JAUHashCode

@JAUToString

@JAUCompare

@JAUCopy

@JAUToMap

public class UserData implements Comparable, Cloneable {

private String firstName;

private String secondName;

private Date birthDate;

private String login;

private String[] rights = new String[] {"view"};

// constructor omitted

public boolean equals(Object obj) {

return JAU.equals(this, obj);

}

public int hashCode() {

return JAU.hashCode(this);

}

public String toString() {

return JAU.toString(this);

}

public int compareTo(Object obj) {

return JAU.compare(this, obj);

}

public UserData clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException {

UserData r = (UserData) super.clone(this);

JAU.copy(this, r);

return r;

}

}

For example, the output for

JAU.toString(new String[][] {{"a", "b"}, {"1", "2"}})

would be

 java.lang.String[][java.lang.String["a", "b"], java.lang.String["1", "2"]]

Web-based Task, Time and Project Management Software Comparison (Part 2)

The great AutoFilter-application for Google Docs helps with big spreadsheets:

http://spreadsheetautofilter.googlepages.com/index.html?url=http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub%3Fkey%3DpNzDN2mIRqnb81JK1LRxdFA%26gid%3D0

Web-based Task, Time and Project Management Software Comparison

Task, Time and Project Management Software was always an important prerequisite for successful projects and not only in the software industry. Recently a lot of software was written using AJAX (guilty :-) making collaboration a lot easier. I have created a Google Table comparing 42 of them:

Task, Time and Project Management Software

Authentication for GWT based applications on Google App Engine

there is a way to use Java together with Google App Engine: GWT together with python-gwt-rpc. Although python-gwt-rpc has it's own means to allow authentication, there is also an easier way: just check in the Python code whether the user is authenticated and generate a login page or a page for hosting your GWT application.

...
from google.appengine.api import users

class MyHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
 def get(self):
   user = users.get_current_user()
  if user is None:
      self.response.out.write('''Login page here...''')
  else:
      self.response.out.write('''GWT hosting page here...''')

here is how it looks in a live application