Utilities

The Utilities component currently consists of the basic XLattice abstractions collected under org.xlattice and a number of common utility classes in the org.xlattice.util package. Any software using XLattice modules must include the util-n.n , where n.n represents the 2 or 3 digit version number.

The utility classes include

• ArrayStack, a fast stack requiring external synchronization
• Base64Coder, which converts byte arrays to Strings and vice-versa
• the org.xlattice.util.cmdline package
• classes for handling JNLP Version numbers,
• NonBlockingLog, a very simple thread-safe logger
• Timestamp, a java.util.Date subclass most useful for formatting timestamps in a consistent way (YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)
• the Version class

CmdLine is a utility for setting program parameters (typed Java variables) from command line options, similar in functionality to getopt. There is a good description of how to use the CmdLine package in the Javadocs .

JNLP (Java Network Launch Protocol) is Sun's Web Start facility for one-click downloading of Java software from the Internet. The software has to be packaged as a jar. JNLP supports automatic updates and allows designers to specify dependencies by an exact match, a partial match, or a "same-or-more-recent" version number.