Re­cently, JSON has be­come an ex­cel­lent al­tern­at­ive to XML. But most JSON pars­ers writ­ten in Java are still rather slow. On my search for faster lib­rar­ies I found two things: BSON and Jack­son.

Some time ago I wrote about how to let Ec­lipse PDE Build auto­mat­ic­ally com­pile Scala pro­jects. There­fore a spe­cial Ant script (customBuildCallbacks.xml) had to be cre­ated in the pro­ject’s root dir­ect­ory. This script looked for the Scala lib­rary and com­piler and then built the pro­ject’s source files.

I’m us­ing Git as the ver­sion con­trol sys­tem for my pro­jects for some time now. Since the graph­ical user in­ter­faces are not very ma­ture yet and I like hav­ing full con­trol over everything, I’m us­ing Git on the com­mand line (i.e. Bash). In or­der to avoid en­ter­ing the same com­mands all over again, I wrote some Bash ali­ases and func­tions which ease the use of Git.

Lift already provides some mech­an­isms to pub­lish a web­site in dif­fer­ent lan­guages. If Lift is used within an OSGi en­vir­on­ment, a little work­around is needed in or­der to make it find the Re­source Bundles con­tain­ing lan­guage-de­pend­ent strings (usu­ally provided as prop­erty files).

PDE Build is the stand­ard build tool from Ec­lipse. It is used to ex­port OSGi bundles, plu­gins, fea­tures or products. Run­ning in head­less mode, PDE Build can be used for auto­matic builds without a GUI. The Scala IDE does not sup­port PDE Build yet. In or­der to com­pile Scala pro­jects you have to do some manual work.

Scala does not have an of­fi­cial style guide yet. Be­cause of this, Daniel Spiewak pos­ted such a doc­u­ment in Novem­ber 2009 on the Scala mail­ing list. As can be read there, even Mar­tin Oder­sky, the in­ventor of Scala, likes that idea and thinks about pub­lish­ing the doc­u­ment on the of­fi­cial Scala web­site.