Torsten Curdt’s weblog

A new version (1.0-alpha-3) of minijar is available. For sure the biggest improvement is that (with the new vafer.org dependency release) the relocation now works for resources and reflection, too. It wraps the calls and pipes them through a static method to point them to the new location. This much superior to static rewriting of strings. Other than that more options (e.g. includes/excludes) are now available and the documentation has been improved.

 ...
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>minijar-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>ueberjar</goal>
                        </goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <stripUnusedClasses>false</stripUnusedClasses>
                            <includeDependencies>
                                <param>org.vafer:dependency</param>
                            </includeDependencies>
                            <includeDependenciesInRelocation>
                                <param>org.vafer:dependency</param>
                            </includeDependenciesInRelocation>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
     ...

Give it a try an let me know how it works for you!

A little late to tell …even a little late for the summary. But hell – yes I was at Fosdem this year. With whole bunch of people from Joost. It was quite different from e.g. ApacheCon. It did have less the professional but the ad-hoc touch. A lot more of the Linux and Mozilla folks are around and it was nice to meet some people from other organizations face to face. Especially interesting was meeting Peter Van der Beken and having a chat about the whole addressbook integration for Thunderbird story. Basically – thunderbird needs more developers.

Well, but anyway …next up in a few weeks is ApacheCon EU in Amsterdam. Hope to see you in there!

Now it’s already more than three weeks since we got back from vacation. And it took a while to sort my thoughts on this trip to Cuba. To put the verdict up front: picturesque but not really recommended.

I don’t want to say it was a bad vacation …but somehow it just seems that general picture of Cuba is a bit too romantic. Don’t you also think of these friendly people living in this beautiful but worn down buildings, music, cigars, rum and a little “viva la revolution”. All this with some sunshine and some “Buena Vista Social Club” music in the background? Well, some of that is true …unfortunately some is not – and if you continue reading it might destroy what you believe Cuba is today.

So what was wrong? Well, the one thing that really annoyed us so much that we were actually happy to be back was the greed – this unbelievable rip-off mentality that I have never ever experienced before like that. Hustlers everywhere! What I really hated is that they made us distrust anyone! This and the arbitrariness.
We met a girl that lived in Cuba for a while about 10 years ago. She so couldn’t stand the new face of Cuba that she was trying to change her flight and leave earlier. I think that speaks a thousand words.

Cuba must have been the pearl of the Caribbean. But it’s seems many Cubanos are selling out the spirit of their country …until everything is gone. Let’s hope they realize this before it is too late. In case you want to experience it yourself here are a few hints that might have helped us a great deal.
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I am off for a two week vacation in Cuba. Really looking forward to kick back and be completely offline. Diving, reading, experiencing the real Cuba while Fidel is still around and of course enjoying some time off with my girl friend. More to tell in two weeks from now. Stay tuned.

Already quite a while ago I blogged about a plugin to shrink your java artifacts in size …to package only what is really required. Especially useful for people complaining that e.g. common-lang got too big. It should help to reduce the copy-and-paste attitude “I don’t need all that” and extract what you need at virtually no effort. Minijar basically builds up transitive hull seeded by the classes of your project artifact and then strips off classes that are not referenced. While doing that you can even combine and in-line all the dependencies into a single jar.

The actual dependency analysis computation for this is factored out into a separate project called “dependency” and so can be used by other projects as well. It uses the byte code toolkit ASM to extract the required information.

Until recently I held off updating minijar because I wanted it to go directly into maven. But now I’ve just turned the patch into changes for the minijar plugin and did a first alpha release over at mojo on codehaus.

<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>minijar-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0-alpha-1</version>

Just give it a try and let me know what you think.