tools

Tools

We use this page to distribute tools which we have found helpful in the past. These tools are not production quality and are offered free of charge. All tools listed on this page are distributed under this license.

Use these products at your own risk!

ClearXml

The idea is simple. Given an XML file, wouldn't it be great if you could generate a class which parses the XML and stores the data as a series of Getters and Setters? Then you could use that class to create an XML file by calling a method like "ToXml()". There are products out there which already solve this problem, but these products generally require a Schema or DTD. We just want to keep it simple.

So we built ClearXml. A simple tool you can use to generate classes from an XML file. Consider the following example:

<Person>
    <name>String</name>
    <address streetNumber="int" streetName="default type is string" zip="string" />
</Person>

Given the XML file above, you could use ClearXml to generate code like:

public class Person : BasePerson { ... }

public class BasePerson
{
   public Name name;
   public Address address;
}

public class Address : BaseAddress { ... }

public class BaseAddress
{
   public int streetNumber
   {
      get{ ... }
      set{ ... }
   }

   public string streetName
   {
      get{ ... }
      set{ ... }
   }

   public string zip
   {
      get{ ... }
      set{ ... }
   }
}

JarSearch

"ClassNotFound" or "MethodNotFound" errors are all too common in java. If you are working on a project with a lot of jar files, it can be difficult to know exactly which jar file is not being properly included .

So we wrote JarSearch. Nothing special - the program is only 100 lines - but it has proven very useful on past projects. The program will find a java class or package in a jar (actually - zip, jar, war, or ear) file. The program can also recursively read a directory of jar files.

A batch file is included to help jumpstart usage. We hope you find it helpful.

Find Replace

Isn't it a pain the Windows does not have a built in Find / Replace program? Here is a helpful little tool which solves this problem - FindReplace.

Find replace

Be careful! This program is not very smart and you could end up replacing "text" in binary files or worse! Make sure you know what you are doing.

The program also includes a dll which can be used in your own programs.

List Files

As a developer, you have to work with files a lot. Often this work can be simplified by creating batch scripts. To help with this process, we created ListFiles. You can use this program to list all the files in a directory (including subdirectories) and append the file name with a prefix or suffix.

list files

It is not much, but we find it useful. We hope you will too.