Happy to announce the release of 0.3.2 of StaGen, the static site generator written in Java 8. StaGen supports Markdown for content and StringTemplate 4 for templating. This version boasts of builds in .tgz and .zip with executable shell-script and Windows batch script stagen. Download the release from GitHub. To install, extract the compressed distribution and add to PATH the bin directory. Fire StaGen from command line:
$ stagen -h
The latest version of RESTClient has support for selecting the type of multipart body that is sent with the request. Certain web API endpoints were not supporting the default RESTClient mode of multipart messages, while a simple curl request succeeded. To support these websites, RESTClient now supports specifying the mode of multipart body type.
Quick links:
Happy to announce the immediate availability of RESTClient 3.4.1 for download and purchase. This is a minor release that fixes a UI rendering bug in Mac, supports UI scaling in high-resolution display devices among other bug fixes and enhancements. Read the release notes here.
JSON validator is a command-line tool for validating/formatting JSON files. The tool is inspired by the cli options of the ever popular xmllint tool.
A minor update to the static site generator from WizTools.org is released. This fixes a bug that was not detecting changes in sub-folders when executing run command.
Wiz WebServer, the web server project has a tumulus history. It all started with the need for me to quickly test JavaScript and minor Ajax scripts. I quickly forked the Java Mini Web Server Project, to create Wiz WebServer. It was pretty heavily used by me and my team for development purposes. But maintaining this code base did not seem to be a good idea, especially when we have such excellent alternatives like Jetty. So, today, with heavy-heart, I scrapped the HTTPD code base of Wiz WebServer, and changed the engine to Jetty. The new release, 0.4.0 version, may be downloaded from: https://bitbucket.org/wiztools/wiz-webserver/downloads.
This release focuses on two important features:
Download, release notes and purchase links available at GitHub.
Happy to announce the second edition of RESTClient book:
The book will be available for free from May 19 to May 23 in Kindle store (PST time). The 3.4 version of RESTClient covered in this book is scheduled for release on 25th May.
I am working on updating the RESTClient book. And this is how I work:
The first public release of StaGen, the static site generator powering WizTools.org, is now available.
Maintaining websites is a hard task. The last version of WizTools.org was maintained using RapidWeaver. In the quest to design a good looking site, I had sacrificed the joy of working with text. While working on recent updates to the site, RapidWeaver brought back nightmares of using MS Word five years back—just a minor text formatting that I could do in less than a second in Markdown was taking minutes of workaround in RapidWeaver.
Then I started researching the best tool for maintaining my site using just text. I just wanted to fire up BBEdit and be productive. Jekyll sounded attractive. But is written in Ruby—I did not want to invest time in hacking this. JBake is in Java, but seemed bulky and used Freemarker templates. I had been sold out to StringTemplate couple of years back, and did not want to maintain my site in Freemarker.
Based on these parameters, I finally decided to write my own static site generator—specific for my needs of maintaining a tiny site like WizTools.org. And thus was born StaGen. Right now, there is no public release of StaGen (it was just written last night!)—but it already is powering WizTools.org home page as of now.
There is a cost associated with OpenSource development. The cost I pay to maintain the domain, the hosting cost, and most importantly, the time I spend coding and fixing things up. Recently, I have been thinking of how to offset this cost of OpenSource development. One arena I was thinking was of making available my builds via App Stores. This gives the end-users the value add of having a certified build, automatically updated to the latest version. I believe, a person, like me, wouldn’t mind paying a small amount for this additional value add, and would provide a source of income for the OpenSource project. Thus started my experiment.
I selected my most popular OpenSource project for this experiment: RESTClient. I began the effort. My initial estimate was for one week after reading this blog. And one fine Monday, couple of weeks back, I began the work. As I progressed, I understood the enormity of the task I had undertaken. From building OpenJDK, to scouring Apple documentation (excellent BTW) written for Xcode development—translating to the Java counterpart, complying to Apple sandbox. I understood that I had jumped into something enormous.
During mid-week, I discovered that making RESTClient compliant to Apple sandbox restrictions is near to impossible due to two reasons:
Based on these developments, I changed my course of plan:
I wanted a store-front to sell my RESTClient binaries. The effort setting up the store and maintenance of it should be minimal. For the customers, it should be simple effort to purchase and download. The only store I explored was FastSpring. I got hooked to its simple interface, and created my product page. This experiment is now ongoing—I am trying to figure out how many people would really pay for a software that is easily available for download as OpenSource.
This is a tool I wrote long back, and used exhaustively for a project, and then forgot about it. I did not even do a public release of the tool. When migrating WizTools.org Google Code projects to GitHub, I noticed this project. Today, I invested some time and cleaned the code and made a release. Get it from: https://github.com/wiztools/xml-validator/releases.
The unix bc tool developed in Java. Download release 1.0 from GitHub.
All newer releases of desktop tools published by WizTools.org will require Java 7. This is a evolutionary step we are taking to benefit from newer constructs introduced in this version of Java.
The message from Google seems to be clear: it does not want to invest in non-profit making venture like Google Code. Google has been killing feature-after-feature from the Google Code service recently. The two most affected me were:
Add to this fact, Google not adding any new feature to Google Code in the recent past.
Well, the message seemed clear. And we have initiated on our part to move WizTools.org code to other well maintained services like GitHub / BitBucket. Our most used project, RESTClient code is already moved to GitHub. Note, we have moved only the source code, Issues and Wiki is still hosted in Google Code. Moving Issues and Wiki will be done in a phased manner in near future.
