My Current Projects

In addition to blogging, working 9 to 5, and generally saving the world, I also have a couple software projects I work on in my spare time. Here are a couple that have reached the point that they’re interesting and/or useful to people other than myself:

WhatsTwending.com — Twitter Search. Simpler.

WhatsTwending is a Twitter search tool that lets people build clouds of relevant words and phrases to help them understand their searches at a glance. For example, this is a cloud of a search for “jquery”, the popular JavaScript library:

If you want to know more, you can check out the blog I wrote about it or the WhatsTwending about page. WhatsTwending is currently in closed Beta, but if you want to try it, use username “sigpwned” and password “roxors” at the WhatsTwending search page (without quotes, of course).

My only request is that you please let me know what you think, good or bad. Seems fair, yeah?

jsonification — JSON for Java that Doesn’t Suck

Ever tried Java JSON libraries? I have. They blow.

Except for mine, jsonification.

Jsonification is designed from the ground up to implement as much of JavaScript’s semantics in Java as possible so that you can use JSON objects in Java like you use them in JavaScript. (Revolutionary, I know.) For example, you can use the following snippet of Java to iterate over a JSON array called objects print the name attribute of each object contained in the array:

for(JsonValue object : objects)
    System.out.println(object.asObject().get("name").asString().getValue());

And it’s all type-safe and uses checked exceptions to keep things nice and Java-y. If you want to know more, check out jsonification’s project page here.

siglib — The “Missing Standard Library” for Java

You know that code that you’ve written over, and over, and over, and over? The code that you seem to need on every project, but don’t have laying around to carry with you?

siglib is that library you can carry around with you. Released under the Apache 2.0 License so you can take it wherever you need to go, and it makes the things that should be easy, easy. For example, to read in the contents of a file as a String, just use this one-liner:

String contents=IOUtil.slurp(new FileReader("/path/to/file"));

siglib takes care of reading the file in efficiently, closing the FileReader, and wrapping the result in a shiny new String.

If you want to know more, check out siglib’s project page.