Saturday 26 April 2008

Survey of J2EE open source tools and libraries

I came across this excellent collection of open source tools and tag libraries with a focus on Java / J2EE tools. There are links and reviews of open source AJAX frameworks, content management systems, J2EE Frameworks, JSP tag libraries and a lot of other goodies.
Most of the topic reference links are active and the content is relatively current. Worth bookmarking if you are working in the Java domain and want to see some of the various open-source offerings on a particular subject.

While on the subject of surveying J2EE tools, an interesting book on the market is Java Power Tools. While the book is basically a compendium of 30 tools ranging from version control systems to QA analysis tools, it tends to gravitate a lot towards the use of Unit testing, Continuous Integration and Stress and Volume testing tools. A look at the TOC doesn't reveal much for the experienced developer but for the newbie J2EE guy, this might be a good starting point. I would have liked it a lot more, if it had a chapter on application servers and 'compared' different frameworks (albeit briefly) such as Struts and Tapestry or Struts and Cocoon. I also missed Hibernate in the TOC. :-( But overall, it looks to be a good read for a newbie.

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