I've just upgraded to the latest release of blojsom (About time, too!). It's a pretty painless process, although it might take me a while to get my old tasteful lime green theme going again.

I've always found processing command line parameters in Java something of
a hassle. It's not hard, but it can be error prone and
having to write the same code over and over is annoying.

Here's a class I wrote that I find useful for this. Usage:

String usage = "java " + YourClass.class.getName() + " -a FirstParam -b
SecondParam";
CmdLineProcessor cmdLine = new CmdLineProcessor(args, usage);
cmdLine.setExpectedArgumentCount(4);
if (cmdLine.process()) {
	String firstParam = cmdLine.getArgument("-a");
	String secondParam = cmdLine.getArgument("-b");
	System.out.println("Parameters were " + firstParam + " and " +
secondParam);
}
// usage message is output if process() did not return true

The class:

public class CmdLineProcessor {
	private String[] args;
	private int expectedArgumentCount = 0;
	private String usageMessage;

	public CmdLineProcessor(String[] args, String usage) {
		this.args = args;
		setUsageMessage(usage);
	}

	public boolean process() {
		if ((args == null)
			|| (args.length != expectedArgumentCount)) {

			System.err.println(getUsageMessage());
			return false;
		}
		return true;
	}

	public String getArgument(String param)
			throws IllegalArgumentException {
		for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
			if (param.equals(args[i] )) {
				if (args.length > (i + 1)) {
					return args[i+1];
				}
			}
		}
		System.err.println(getUsageMessage());
		throw new IllegalArgumentException();
	}

	public int getExpectedArgumentCount() {
		return expectedArgumentCount;
	}

	public String getUsageMessage() {
		return usageMessage;
	}

	public void setExpectedArgumentCount(int i) {
		expectedArgumentCount = i;
	}

	public void setUsageMessage(String string) {
		usageMessage = string;
	}
}

Feel free to reuse it as you need.

Obviously I haven't done much blogging lately. However, I have moved house and done a few trips to
various far-flung places around the country.

I flew back from Perth last week. The Perth<->Adelaide trip normally takes around 3 hours. We had (according to
the pilot) 300 kph tail winds, so we did it 2:15, which was great!

Another, unrelated note: a hand whisk taped to a piece of plastic attached to a hammer drill does NOT make
a suitible substitute for an electric beater. It will, however do a great job of painting the kitchen with cheesecake…

Classifier4J is my Bayesian classification tool written in Java.

I have just released version 0.51, which is a bug fix for release 0.5 (done in December).

See the news page for details.

Tim Bray is going to work at Sun. That is
the best bit of news about Sun I've heard for a long, time. Hopefully he will be able to express some of Sun's ideas in
a less confusing way than the mixed messages we currently get.

Someone (I'm hoping a few referers from this link) should point him at JavaBlogs
and tell him to add himself to it – since that's where all the cool kids get their news (in the Java world, anyway).

The Pluto (JSR168 RI) Website
has been updated. If you have any comments on what we can do better, either let me know,
enter them Bugzilla or send them to the mailing lists.

In particular if you notice any mistakes or things that could be more clear on the
Using the Pluto Portal page please let
me know. I'm quite keen for the Pluto documentation to more closely follow the “Ant” model of Apache documentation
(ie: lots of correct and understandable documentation) than the “Maven” model.

I am wondering if there are any updates on the progress of the JSR proposed in
this
message? Small quote:

The Search Specification will be an API for composing and federating search queries to a
set of search providers, and aggregating returned results. The main
goal is to support search as a way of integrating enterprise
systems. Examples of use cases include a Java web application or
portal that offers combined Web, enterprise, and site search, or a front-end
Java customer support application that offers search of a variety of
back-end enterprise applications, as a way of locating all available
information on a particular customer.