Java odds and ends: replacing Quartz, waiting for Servlet 3.0, standardising IoC
Ok, here's a brief link parade on some things that look interesting within Java world.
First: Cron4j looks like it could replace Quartz for a fairly common use case I have which is that of scheduling background batch processes. Quartz is all good, but it is rather a big library and does much more than what I mostly need (and pulls a few dependencies in too). So this might simplify some deployments a lot if it works like it should (haven't yet played with it)
And then, the long-awaited Servlet 3 specification seems to be improving, as per Greg W of Jetty who has been watching it closely, and has good perspective on things it tries to address. Sounds good.
And last but probably not least, there's one more potentiall small but useful project to "standardize the good stuff": specifically, @Inject (potentially to be known as JSR-303, see James' blog entry for more info, commentary) proposal. Seems like a good idea to allow some level of compatibility for IoC annotations that are used independent of IoC provider being used. For what it's worth, I agree with James -- better get simple useful no-brainer stuff out sooner, and let the "big plans" take their course. No need to delay things that want to be agile.
