After having used Apache Builder for a week and extracted our Warbler-code into a bonafide extension, I’m sharing it with the community under the fetching name Barbler. Barbler integrates itself between the build and packaging stages of the Apache Builder lifecycle and makes calls into Warbler to automate WAR-file creation. Now Warbler does a really good job for packaging standalone Rails apps. Unfortunately I needed something more integrated into our application build process, that pulls in our Spring Framework-based Java code, Scala code, and Rails application and produces a single WAR-file...

At Vamosa we’re big fans of the Java Virtual Machine. It allows us to use the right tool for the job and deliver a high-quality consistent product for our end-users, whilst still getting the most of our developers. For years we were a .NET and Java shop. Our GUI developers would work in Visual Studio writing a C# application that via SOAP webservices would talk to the Java-backend. In June 2008 we decided to abandon our .NET Desktop GUI and redevelop and expand its functionality, delivered to the end-user’s browser using HTML+CSS+JavaScript from our Java-backend. We spend 7months hacking...