Displaytag

I noticed an article on The Server Side about the lack of J2EE components available. Someone pointed out displaytag.
I'd not heard of it before, but really wish I had. It is a JSP Tag Library that allows you to generate good looking tables with little effort.
It integrates reasonably well with struts although I am having some minor troubles with "Save as CSV". You get paging and sorting columns for free on anything that supports Comparator. All in all it looks great and I wish I'd found it months ago.
Try the demo tables running from Sourceforge.

CruiseControl and CheckStyle

I started a new project recently, and found it rather frustrating that my CheckStyle output wasn't appearing in my CruiseControl output jsp files.

The problem turned out to be that the output of the checkstyle tests was being brought inline into the build log rather than written externally i.e. I needed to change the checkstyle report to behave as follows :


< checkstyle config="./checkstyle.properties">
< fileset dir="${src.path}" includes="**/*.java"/>
< formatter type="xml" toFile="${junit.log.location}/CheckstyleErrors.xml"/>
< /checkstyle


and then merge in the xml file via the CruiseControl config file.