Homepages of friends and colleagues

• Charlie Fishers Blog - A blog about the daily IT business and the things that may bedevil those poor coder souls.
• BI Publisher Blog - A blog about the development with BI Publisher by Charlie Fisher, Jamie Yates and Mike Wester.
• Wandls.net - The homepage of Helmut Wandl, a former colleague. He creates professional homepages. Reference projects are listed on his homepage.

Other homepages that I worked on

In this list are other homepages where I was involved. (At the moment there is only one homepage with an English version.)

• Projekt XXIII
  The homepage of the first field work that Christian Wagner and I made at the Vienna University of Technology. For this work we shot short movies and added CG effects to them. We also completely rendered some movies by animating computer graphics. Finally we created a DVD with those movies.

APIs

Some links to API documentations.

• Java 11 API or Java 17 API - The API documentation pages for the current LTS versions of Java.
• Java 7 API or Java 8 API - Two older versions of the Java API documentation that are still very useful because of the layout with the class list on the left and the details on the right side. I could not find this layout for the current API documentations.
• Java SE Tutorial - Tutorials for the Java Standard Edition.
• J2EE API - Java EE 7 Specification APIs - The Java Enterprise Edition API.
• Java EE 6 Tutorial - Tutorials for the Java Enterprise Edition.
• Java Server Faces (JSF) API - Description of all tags and functions for the xhtml files of an JSF application.
• Bootsfaces API - Description of all available Bootsfaces entities. Bootsfaces improves the JSF framework by adding the design possibilities of Bootstrap. Especially the description how Bootsfaces works with AJAX is very helpful.
• Java Mail API - Always useful if you want to speak Java with a simple text editor and you want to fetch or send mails.
• Apache POI API: the Java API for Microsoft Documents - If you want to write Java programs that work with Microsoft documents (MS Word, MS Excel, ...), this is the library you should use. (Also very helpful is the Busy Developer Guide for excel files.)
• Apache Commons Compress - A Java library to read and create ZIP files. To work with this library the following links were helpful:
  • User Guide for Apache Commons Compress
  • How to write a byte array into a ZipArchiveOutputStream
• Hibernate API - The API documentation for the Hibernate framework that realizes a mapping from entities of relational databases to Java objects.
• Lombok - A project to reduce Boilerplate code by using Java annotations. Get and set methods are automatically generated.
• W3Schools - Very helpful tutorials concerning the topics HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX or ASP.NET.
• Stackoverflow - If APIs cannot help anymore, I often find helpful solutions at this address.

Java Tutorials

Some interesting documentations that are useful for programming in Java.

• Preventing SQL Injection in Java - This coding style should be used to create applications that can not be cracked by sql tags in input fields. Read more about SQL Injection.
• Java .properties files - In this tutorial you can see how you can use properties files to easily configure your java application.

Useful coding tools

• Notepad++ - My favourite text editor on Windows for basic tasks.
• IntelliJ IDEA - The first Java IDE that really worked great for me! And a community edition is also available.
• Pulsar - The successor of the editor Atom that I used for programming tasks on Windows and Linux. Regrettably the Atom editor project was closed down in 2022. Pulsar is currently (February 2023) in the beta phase. I am looking forward to test this new editor.
• VSCodium - An open source version of VS Code that I use to develop my Java applications.
• SonarLint - A free IDE extension for IntelliJ, Eclipse, VS Code and VS Codium to detect possible bugs, issues and code smells immediately in the coding process.
• Adoptium (formerly AdoptOpenJDK) - A page to get free prebuilt binary downloads for OpenJDK versions. This got more and more important as Oracle and Red Hat downloads require an account to get the java developer kit.
• Notepadqq - A text editor for Linux that is similar to Notepad++.
• Tortoise Subversion - Adds SVN functionality to the Windows file explorer. I recommend it, if you are going for SVN.
• Tortoise Git - As there is a Tortoise for Subversion, there is also a Tortoise for Git. Context menu functions for Git are made available by this tool in the Windows explorer.
• WinMerge - An application to compare source code files, which is also used by Tortoise Subversion.
• Trac - A web application written in Python to manage coding projects. Here is a list of some features:
  • A wiki to write documentation.
  • A ticket system to inform about necessary changes or bugs in the program.
  • Reports to manage the tickets. Customized reports can be created.
  • Access to a subversion repository can be established to browse changes in the code.
  • Milestone management to plan and control the progress of the project.
  • A very good linking system: It is possible to link from each of these systems to the other.
     
• TracHacks - Add-ons for Trac that may not be regularly maintained.
• SQLite - A lightweight database allowing to store data permanently without the overhead of the installation and the maintenance of a database service. Only the database file and an interface is needed to access the file. Where SQLite should be used is discussed here.
• SqliteJDBC - A JDBC driver for SQLite databases. (I have not tested this version so far, but my previous link is no longer available.)
• Doxygen - A tool to create API documentations for a huge number of programming languages.
• License Selector - A website to select the best license for the software that you want to publish.
• Java Decompiler - Yet another fast Java decompiler

Web development

Some useful links for developing webpages.

• JQuery - A Javascript framework to enrich homepages and web applications with AJAX functionality. For example data can be dynamically loaded on pages without performing a complete reload of the page.
• YUI Compressor - A java application to compress javascript and css files. A short description how I worked with it:
  • Download the current version and extract the jar file from the build directory.
  • Copy the file that should be compressed into the same directory as the jar file.
  • Open a terminal and enter this directory.
  • Use the following command: java -jar yuicompressor-x.y.z.jar myfile.js -o myfile-min.js
• EPPlus - A C# library to create Excel files for ASP.NET web applications.
  • I found this helpful library by reading this StackOverflow thread.
• FluentFTP (formerly known as System.Net.FtpClient) - A C# library to establish an FTP connection and transfer files between the local system and an FTP server.
  • I found the hint to this library on this StackOverflow page.
• CKEditor - A WYSIWYG web editor, which allows a web application to store information in a formatted way like in MS Word. The editor converts the formatted text to HTML. It is also possible to copy images from the clipboard into the editor, but as this information is base64 encoded this might create a lot of data and might slow down your web application.
• Syntax Highlighter - A javascript library, that allows to show source code on a homepage nicely formatted.

Firefox Add-Ons

As Firefox is my favourite browser, I am listing some plug-ins here.

• Adblock Plus - To get rid of commercials when you browse.
• HTML Validator - To check whether a website corresponds to the W3C standards.

Scrum

Some helpful links for the project management framework Scrum.

• Wikipedia page about Scrum - A good introduction to Scrum.
• The official Scrum Guide
• Scrum Alliance - About Scrum - The explanation of Scrum of the Scrum Alliance
• Retromat - offers many ideas how to do your retrospectives to avoid routine in the improvement process of your project. (This page was the reason, why I started this Scrum section here.)
  
  Further pages for ideas how to create your retrospective
  • Reinventing Organisations of Luis Goncalves
  • Gamestorming
  • Fun retrospectives
• Retrospective - Anti-Patterns - Things that should NOT happen in retrospectives.

Miscellaneous

This is another list of handy tools.

• PhotoRec - An open source program to recover data from corrupt data storage media. (I managed to recover images from a CD that could not be read by the Windows file explorer and several CD burning applications.)
  
  To recover data from floppy disks this documentation is very helpful.
  
  If a recovery with photorec fails, the program testdisk, which is included in the download, can be tried. It is especially helpful to recover deleted files.
• PDF Split and Merge (PDFSAM) - An open source program to edit PDF files. The following functionalities are provided:
  • Split a PDF file into several files.
  • Merge several PDF files into one.
  • Modify the order of the pages.
  • Rotate PDF files.
    (Single pages can also imported into GIMP. There they can also be rotated. Additionally the full image processing functionality is available and the result can be exported into the PDF format. For this export layers have to merged, otherwise an automatic merge is applied, which may not create the correct result. Several pages of an PDF are imported as layers. I have not tested, if they are exported as several pages again or if they are merged to one page.)
• PDF-Shuffler - An open source program to modify PDF files.
  Regrettably my PDFSAM installation on Ubuntu 18.04 did no longer start. In the terminal window the following error message was shown:
  Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javafx/scene/layout/HBox
  I found PDF-Shuffler as alternative to PDFSAM. My usual tasks are removing pages and merging several PDF files into a single file.
• Audacious - An open source audio player for Linux and Windows, which is really easy to use. I tested it with the file formats mp3 and ogg.
• ISO to USB - A freeware application for Windows to create bootable USB sticks from ISO files. I tested this successfully on Windows 7 with the ISO file from Boot-Repair.)
• ScreenToGif - A free software for Windows to record GIF animations showing how to use an application. (In my case it is often used to show me how to recreate bugs in web applications :-))