Some time ago I came across an interesting article on Apache’s wiki entitled (Apache Wiki: The Elements Of Ant Style. It’s a very thourough overview of good practices for writing clean, readable, reusable and efficient Ant build files.

Today, through magpiebrain, I read on OnJava another very interesting and concise article giving 15 Ant best practices. It’s much shorter than the previous article on Apache’s wiki, but still, with those 15 practices you’ll manage to improve some messy build scripts. Believe me !

A bit more than a year ago, I wrote some utility classes related to file encodings/charsets. Those classes got integrated to IntelliJ IDEA. Those classes are useful for knowing the encoding of a byte array, or a file, or an input stream. You’ll be able to know whether your file is encoded using UTF-8, or whether it used ISO-8859-1, or windows’ specific windows-1252.

Unfortunately, inside IntelliJ IDEA, it is not currently possible to know the charset of the files edited. I filed a feature request in june. Unfortunately, this feature has not yet been implemented.

Pour le fun, j’ai eu envie d’essayer l’API XML-RPC de la fondation Apache. Pour être précis, je vouais expérimenter avec les APIs de Blogger et MetaWeblog qui permettent de mettre à jour les Weblogs à distance. Ce sont des APIs standardisées que la pluspart des Weblog comprennent.

Ainsi, par exemple, l’outil de publication w.Bloggar permet de éditer/modifier/créer des nouvelles entrées dans votre blog. Pour cela, il fait appel aux procédures distantes (Remote Procedure) du serveur hébergeant votre blog.