Sunday 30 September 2007

FlatPack 3.1.0 released with Mule Contribution

Second post in 3 days... wow! Things are happening!

We are pleased to announce release 3.1.0 of FlatPack for Java 1.4+.

FlatPack is the new name for PZFileReader as the project has outgrown the initial scope of reading files...

Open Source flat file parser (CSV, Fixed Length, Custom) using XML to configure formats.

http://flatpack.sourceforge.net

This is an important release with a new name and package structure. Users of previous version should find it easy to migrate as most classes have kept their original name.

A major development is the experimental release of writers for exporting DataSets. We would like to thank Dirk and Holger from the Mule Project for their kind contribution to FlatPack. We're looking forward to the result of using FlatPack in Mule, a great Open Source ESB.

This release also adds a few convenience methods on a DataSet and the Parser classes, fixes a couple of bugs.
More on changes at: http://flatpack.sf.net/changes-report.html.

FlatPack is released under the business friendly Apache License v2.0.

The library is small, lightweight and does not force you to adopt a framework.

The implementation is useful to any business that deal with flat files. Not only can it parse very quickly some CSV or any-user defined delimiter, this library can parse FIXED LENGTH files.

The library allow you to define an XML mapping (or in a database) of the format of your file. Once this is done, the parsed data can be accessed via a simple name lookup mechanism.

It is our aim to publish at some point some well know file formats for your immediate use. Please contribute if you have some standard files...

It is available for download via SourceForge or the Maven Central Repository (both Maven 1 and Maven 2). The homepage has some very quick examples.

Maven Repositories:
M1: http://objectlabkit.sf.net/m1-repo
M2: http://objectlabkit.sf.net/m2-repo

ObjectLab is not new to the open-source community having used numerous OS projects, It has recently launched the ObjectLab Kit family, including:
- QALab (http://qalab.sourceforge.net), a tool that keeps track over-time of the static analysis results from FindBugs, Checkstyle, PMD, Cobertura etc.
- DateCalculators (http://objectlabkit.sourceforge.net), a set of generic lightweight and thread-safe Date calculators for Business and Finance.
- JTreeMap, (http://jtreemap.sourceforge.net), probably the only Java Open Source implementation of treemap/heatmaps, available as a Swing or SWT component.
- StatSVN, (http://www.statsvn.org), statistics for your Subversion repo.

We would like to thanks our friends and colleagues for their help, reviews and suggestions.

Sorry for the long post...

Feel free to pass on to people who may be interested.

Enjoy!!

Paul Zepernick and Benoit Xhenseval

Friday 28 September 2007

ObjectLabKit selected for Open Financial Market Platform

Hi

I meant to send this a long long time ago... So here is the not-so-new news.

My friend Neil Barlett (Mr OSGi and Eclipse) spotted this mention of the ObjectLabKit (DateCalculator) as part of the proposal for the Open Financial Market Platform.

http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/ofmp/

I can only say this: Wow!

I hope it succeeds as the main reason for creating this little library was our frustration at re-inventing the wheel so many times... I know a couple of big investment banks using it now, so it was worth it!

Back to work now...


Benoit