Last weekend I got a little spare time an through together a small little library while should help with the problem of boring Java console applications on Windows.

So in my last post I was suggesting making it easier to include dependency checksums as part of a maven build. I decided that it should be simple enough to implement this as a Maven Plugin. For those of you interested, you can get the source to the new Checksum Plugin here.

For those of you who don’t know, Maven is an awesome build tool. It uses centralized repositories to share build artifacts. Right now there is a problem, where if a repository is hacked, malicious code could be injected into those artifacts and distributed by other builds. Lots of folks object to using maven solely due to this possibility. It’s a good thing that the maven teams seems to be working on fix those problems.

Wow, I love the simplicity that ZooKeeper brings to a really hard set of distributed problems. Check out this Introductory Video that explains it more in depth. Basically group leadership/coordination and cluster wide configuration issues are taken care of if you Use ZooKeeper.

Note to self: investigate implementing the Double Write Buffers idea in ActiveMQ. ActiveMQ keeps several indexes into the persistent messages that it’s holding and when ActiveMQ is shutdown ungracefully, we rebuild the indexes from the data logs due to them being in inconsistent state. If your queueing up millions of messages, building those indexes can take a long time.