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Useful Links

Java Tutorials

Eclipse Tutorials, Tools, Etc…

  • Lars Vogel’s eclipse tutorials – which I have found easy to read, comprehensive and complete. He
    also has Java and Android tutorials which I have not read but if they are of the same level as his eclipse tutorials they are surely worth
    reading.
  • The GEF wiki has a number of good resources, although most of them very high level:
  • Google CodePro Analytix, a static code analysis plugin for eclipse provided by Google. Very useful.
  • Some GMF tutorials. Many are not updated but if you read them all you will get a rough idea on how to work with GMF:

Modeling, UML, etc

  • Great UML diagram reference by Kirill Fakhroutdinov
  • MS Visio templates for UML modeling
  • There are two open source projects that implement a UML editor on top of the eclipse platform: Topcased and Papyrus. After searching some time in the Topcased site for an owner of the project I saw that Papyrus is simply the next generation of Topcased, so I will only write about the later. Papyrus is an eclipse incubation project supported by list, the Lab of applied research in software-intensive technologies of cea, a french government-funded technological research organization and Atos, an “international information technology services company” based in France. It is a fairly active project, seems to have a good users guide and a developer guide (I just skimmed the site). But it seems a little funny to me that while they are creating a UML editor I could not find any UML documentation of the project :-). The editor is GMF based. I tried using the tool to create some sequence diagrams for my classes and private projects but the tools is not very user-friendly (for sequence diagrams. Maybe for other diagrams it is better).
  • A free (but not open source) UML editor is Visual Paradigm for UML, which has a “community edition” which is free for non-commercial use. This is the tool which I am using for all my UML modeling (well, most of it, since there are still things that only Visio can handle). I used it to create use cases, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, timing diagrams, and state machine diagrams. The commercial edition has many more features like code generation, database generations, reverse engineering and others, but since I don’t have the needs (nor the money) to buy the full version, I have not tested these features yet.

Free Software I Use

A list of free programs (some open source, some just freeware) that I use and have found very helpful:

  • IcoFX: very cool icon editor for windows.
  • GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program. The name says it all.
  • Java Ascii Versatile Editor: very useful when you want to add drawings to code comments.
  • FileZilla: Free, open source FTP client (and server, but have never used it).

Sites I Use

  • Icon archives and search engines: Icon Archive, FindIcons, FreeIconsWeb.
  • yUML: fast and simple way to create UML use case, activity and class diagrams on line. The diagram is written in text and the site renders it for you.
  • Web-Based Ascii drawing and rendering: Asciiflow is a very simple editor for ascii drawings. Ditaa can take ascii drawings and render them to nice graphs. Pretty cool.
  • Since Skype started charging extra for desktop sharing, I found join.me, a very smooth and almost-no-configuration-needed desktop sharing application. Thanks guys!
  • WebSequenceDiagrams: drawing sequence diagrams was never so fun and easy.
  • Test your regular expressions using RegexPlanet.
  • Screencast-O-Matic: great, FREE utility to grab screencasts. You can even translate them to animated GIFs! what else can you ask for?
  • Unsplash: free stock photography
  • Hemingway: helps write better.
  • Downforeveryoneorjustme: the name says it all.
  • Software Licensing in Plain English: for the non-legal humans of us..

WordPress

Software Libraries I Use

I think that one of the most important features of a programming language are the libraries available in that language. And this is one of the things I like about Java – there are millions of open source libraries out there. The problem is finding the one that matches your needs. Here is a list of the libraries I have found useful.

  • Google guava: multi-purpose classes to make the life of the programmer a bit easier. For now I am only using the Preconditions class to check preconditions and states in my functions, and have found it’s functionality just perfect.
  • JGraphT: an open source graph algorithm library. I liked it because it has a simple API and it can be used after a couple of minutes of reading the code and the documentation without having to invest too much time (as opposed to some libraries I have met in the past, and have gladly forgotten their names).
  • EasyMock: simple and powerful java mocking framework.

Bookmarks for later use

This is my private list of bookmarks. You should stop reading right here :-)… OK, so you kept reading. This is a fairly random list of sites I would like to check in the future, or want to keep in my mind, but my mind is usually full. Of course I could use Evernote, Springpad or other stuff like that, but having my own site, why not store them here?

  • Open source perceptual computing: OpenCV
  • Rosetta code: implementing the same functionality in many different languages. Cool stuff.
  • Mailchimp has free mailing lists for small number of subscribers.
  • CMU Sphinx: speech recognition toolkit.
  • HTTT-Request: java library for simple access to HTTP requests and responses.
  • Colorbrewer: color adviser for cartography, but can be used nicely any purpose.

Brain Maintenance

A number of siteדsto maintain and improve your brain

General Things

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