Codehaus.org was officially registered in February 2003 by Bob McWhirter. The website described itself as a “collaborative software development environment for projects” (Source). Apart from being a source code repository, Codehause.org also had links to forums and news. It was the home of popular projects like Groovy, Mojo Maven plugins, X-Stream, and successful projects linked to Java, such as JMock, XDoclet, Jackson, and Mule.
Extending the Haus
Over the years, Codehaus.org expanded as other developers started asking to use the source code repository. An archived page of Codehaus.org reports that Codehaus become more popular when it started hosting PicoContainer (Source). It’s not clear which year this was. PicoContainer is a mature dependency injector framework now hosted at GitHub.
In October 2003, over a dozen code developers from different parts of the world congregated in Amsterdam over a weekend. They aimed to share ideas, present about projects, and generally socialize. It was at this meeting that Groovy was created (Source). Groovy is a Java platform-based object-oriented language.
In 2004, Codehaus.org acquired a larger hosting capacity from Sentex in Canada.
What Happened to Codehaus.org
In 2015, Codehaus.org announced that it had come to the end of its life. The project, which played a significant role in software development, bows out with a simple, “Thanks.” Adding, “Codehaus would not have been the success it was (in its prime) without the support of Contegix and the projects that continued using and promoting its usage.” Contegix, the provider of customer experience digital applications, used to be the main sponsor of Codehaus.org.
But what were these projects that “continued using and promoting its usage.” We identified 10 of the most important. To identify these projects, we looked for the ones that obtained the highest number of inbound links from websites, writers, and editors.
10 Most Important Codehaus.org Projects
1. Groovy
Groovy is an award-winning “dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine.” Codehause.org described Groovy as “a super version of Java.” It also notes that Groovy “can leverage Java’s enterprise capabilities and has cool productivity features like closures, builders, and dynamic typing.” Advising, “If you are a developer, tester, or script guru, you have to love Groovy” (Source).
Developers seemed to echo the same sentiments, with some describing it as “Java on steroids.” Subsequent versions of Groovy provided developers with more capabilities. They included new domain-specific language authoring capabilities to enhance readability and clarity of their business rules and bundling the GPars parallel.
2. Jackson
Jackson is an open-source JSON processor for Java, which uses impressive words like “fast, powerful, extremely configurable, and fully conformant” to describe itself.
Jackson does not only promise that it’s faster than any other Java JSON parsers and data binders, but it also undertakes to offer more than basic streaming JSON functionalities, including full node-based Tree Models and full Object/JSON Mapper data binding capabilities.
3. XStream
XStream calls itself as “a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.” The developers of the project list ease of use, clean XML, full object graph support, an alternative output format as some of the library’s main features.
XStream is typically used for Unit Tests, Configuration, Persistence, and Transport. It provides detailed diagnostics to help solve or isolate errors, such as exceptions.
4. Boo
The developers of Boo, a free software, call it an “object-oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) with a python inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility.”
Some of Boo’s key features include what the developers call an ultra-clean (wrist-friendly) syntax with python-style indentations, brackets, and semicolons for highly readable code with no unnecessary keywords. The software was released under the BSD 3-Clause license.
5. Jetty
According to the makers of Jetty, this is “an open-source Java-based web HTTP server, HTTP client and javax.servlet.” It is more commonly used for machine-to-machine communication within the Java ecosystem.
The developers of Jetty note that it can be “embedded in devices, tools, application servers, frameworks, and clusters” (Source). Therefore, it can be used in a wide range of projects and products, both in production and development.
Jetty reports that it has powered application servers like Apache Geronimo, frameworks such as GWT, large clusters like the Yahoo Hadoop Cluster, and cloud computing applications, such as the Google App Engine.
6. Woodstox
Woodstox describes itself as a “high-performance open-source XML processor” that is StAX (JSR-173), SAX2, and StAX2 compliant. The developers say that it implements StAX APIs and has the most complete XML support that includes full native DTD support, validation, notations, and entities.
Woodstox promises to detect all XML problems and provide accurate reports, complete with location information, and feature full namespace support.
7. Esper
Esper promises to bring “Event Stream Processing (ESP) and Complex Event Processing (CEP) to the mainstream with an Open Source approach, ensuring rapid innovation with quality productization, support, and services for mission-critical environments, from SOA to eXtreme Transaction Processing deployments.”
Key Esper features include Event Pattern Matching, with both logical and temporal event correlation. Others include event representations, prepared statements and substitution parameters, and input adapters.
8. StAX
StAX (Streaming API for XML) is a standard API for processing Extensible Markup Language (XML). It allows developers to stream XML data to and from their applications. It has a pull parser standard interface and can read and write an application programming interface (API).
Some of the main features of StAX include a small memory footprint and Open Source (Apache ASL 2.1). It also permits the “implementation of most core features: non-validating DTD-aware parser and serializer” (Source).
9. GPars
The GPars (Groovy Parallel Systems) framework was built upon the Groovy programming language’s flexibility to provide Java developers with safe and intuitive ways to tackle Groovy and Java tasks concurrently.
GPars focus on elegant Groovy and Java APIs by providing flexibility through meta-programming and application-level solutions that scale with the number of cores. Since it’s an open-source framework, developers are free to use it on both open-source and commercial projects.
10. Sonar
Sonar was initially released in 2006-2007. It’s an open-source software quality management platform that offers developers a central place to monitor their code’s quality.
It provides a continuous inspection of code, complete with visual reports on or across their projects. Sonar can also conduct automatic reviews and analyze code to detect code smells, bugs, and security vulnerabilities in more than 20 programming languages.