Vert.x is a toolkit for build­ing re­act­ive ap­plic­a­tions on the Java Vir­tual Ma­chine. The pro­ject main­tain­ers are cur­rently work­ing hard to get the new ver­sion 3.0 out. Tim Fox, the ori­ginal cre­ator of Vert.x and one of its core de­velopers, was re­cently look­ing for someone to re­design the Vert.x web­site. I offered to take over the job! I con­sider this an op­por­tun­ity to give something back to the great Vert.x com­munity!

Today I’m very pleased to an­nounce the new design of my web­site! I put a lot of ef­fort into mak­ing it clean and fea­ture-rich at the same time. My goal was to re­duce the num­ber of dis­tract­ing ele­ments while keep­ing the func­tion­al­ity of the old site.

I just re­leased the new ver­sion 1.6 of my free spam fil­ter Spami­hil­ator! This ver­sion is a main­ten­ance re­lease. It fixes some minor bugs and im­proves se­cur­ity. In­stall­a­tion is re­com­men­ded to all users.

The new ver­sion of the Gradle plug­in gradle-down­load-task 1.2 has just been re­leased. The plug­in provides a Download task that dis­plays pro­gress in­form­a­tion while down­load­ing files, just like Gradle does when it fetches an ar­ti­fact from a re­pos­it­ory.

Ver­sion 2.4 of bson4­jack­son has just been re­leased. bson4­jack­son adds sup­port for BSON, a bin­ary rep­res­ent­a­tion of JSON, to the Jack­son JSON pro­cessor.

I really like how Gradle dis­plays pro­gress while it’s fetch­ing ar­ti­facts from Maven re­pos­it­or­ies, but I was al­ways won­der­ing why you can­not use the same func­tion­al­ity when you’re down­load­ing ar­bit­rary files in your build script. You can of course use An­t’s down­load task to fetch files, but it does not dis­play pro­gress in­form­a­tion. Since I could­n’t find a solu­tion on the In­ter­net I de­cided to write a plug­in.