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Do you really save receipts for your business purchases? Its a huge pain and usually not worth your time. But since the data is already in an electronic format somewhere (e.g. the vendor you bought from), then what if you could simply get that version quickly and easily? You could simplify your tax compliance without doing much work. Finally found a solution to tackle this head on -- Greenback.com.

We are excited to rollout Rocker -- a Java 8 optimized, near zero-copy rendering, speedy template engine that produces statically typed, plain java object templates that are compiled along with the rest of your project. No more "warm-up" time in production, slow reflection-based logic, or nasty surprises that should have been caught during development.

Ever wish Maven could run a specific command if any files in your project change? Some IDEs have their own features to do X if a file changes, but they usually don't take your full Maven project file into account. Problem finally solved with the Watcher Plugin for Maven. Add to your Maven project file and fire it up in a new shell. Maven will continuously and recursively watch any number of configured directories and then execute a series of goals if a file change is detected. Just like if you typed it on the command-line! We use it at Fizzed across a bunch of projects, but mainly our web projects -- where we want a full compile run any time our Java code, resources, or templates change. Works especially well from a project parent to watch any of your sub modules too.

Ninja is a full stack web framework for Java. Stork is an "after-build" tool for Java. Lately, I run all webapps in a stand-alone process (embed Jetty/Netty/etc) and use a reverse proxy (Nginx) to send requests to it. While Ninja is easy to package as a war file that's ready to run in Tomcat/Jboss/etc, it's not as easy to package it as a stand-alone app that can run as a daemon/service. Ninja + Stork to the rescue! Stork integrates with Ninja in just 2 easy steps.

Font Mfizz version 1.2 was released today. Font Mfizz is the free and open source web font that provides scalable vector icons representing programming languages, operating systems, software engineering, and technology. Based on user feedback, the latest version adds 14 icons spanning 12 new topics for a total of 91 glyphs. The full release notes can be viewed on GitHub.

A free and open source Play Framework Module for Twitter is now available! It supports play framework version 2.x and it will fetch, cache, and display tweets from Twitter. It's resilient against Twitter API downtime/rate-limiting by maintaining a cached copy of the last successful API call. It supports rendering tweets into html for simple display. It's published to maven central for quick and easy installation as a dependency in your play project.

There are a handful of articles on how to build a module for version 2.x of the Play Framework. While those articles are an excellent starting point, they were lacking information on configuration, exposing a plugin, and publishing them to maven central. This post will explain how to build, maintain, publish, and use your Play Framework 2.x module in other projects.

Tapping into your build system to automatically generate source code that includes build information (version, date, dependencies) is not only smart, it should be the standard. For Maven-based Java projects, I've long had a technique I use in every project by defining it in a standard parent pom.xml file used in every project. For Play framework's SBT-based build system, there fortunately is a plugin (sbt-buildinfo) which can accomplish the same result with just a few simple tweaks.

A URL shortener service converts a long URL to a much shorter URL. The shortened version is much easier to include in a tweet, comment, or post. For example, http://blog.lauer.bz/2012/03/attack-of-url-shorteners.html would be cumbersome to include in a tweet, but the bit.ly shortened version http://bit.ly/z5DbQX is much more concise. Also, its easier to track the number of clicks and generate metrics by using a shortened URL.