Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Progress: LaternaCommon

The second thing I've done in the last months is LaternaCommon. It is more or less a collection of useful utilities:
  • It provides a single, application-wide TreeProperties object, loaded from a configurable location
  • Configures log4j from a properties file, either configured directly, or by naming a property which stores the location
  • Provides an error-handling dialog for uncaught exceptions or to invoke manually
  • last but not least, it has a tool that can automatically unzip a file inside the jar. this is very useful to init an application on its first launch.
    With this utility, you store a regular zip file inside the jar, and configure a destination directory and a check file on the file system. If the check file is not found on launch, the zip file is unpacked to the specified directory. Any number of zip files can be specified this way.
I really like how these features all integrate: if the properties don't exist, unpack them. then, configure logging using the properties. last, use the logging utilities for error handling.
You can use this, too, for free. However, I haven't yet uploaded a jar'ed version of it.

Okay, that's for now, and don't worry, in the last few days I resumed development of the core program!

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