jezuch-utils

This is a toolkit of classes and interfaces that were generic enough to put into a separate entity, for everyone to enjoy and (ab)use. But let me warn you, that however I tried to make it somewhat usable, the level of abstraction can be murderous for some (wooses!). The thing is, I took advice of ESR and learned LISP. Nothing is the same since then. You may notice a declarative and/or functional scent in lots of places in my code. It seems that I hate loops now ;)

There are several packages in the library:

• jezuch.utils: a collection of perverted things like CollectionAdapter or LookupSet. Basically just a junkyard of ideas of how to avoid loops and write everything the most declarative and/or functional way.
• jezuch.utils.parameters: an attempt to make java.util.Properties more type-safe. When I think of it, it reminds me of jelly (no, not the brain-damaged attempt to turn XML into programming language). Basically the Parameters class maps keys (of generic type K) to... something. This "something" is given as an argument to calls to setValue and getValue - you can put something as a String and get out as an Integer - and it will convert it on-the-fly for you (if the String does not represent a valid Integer, it will throw an exception). You can install validators for keys that will guard for proper values (they have a side-effect of being type-keepers for values). You can request a live view of the values as a Map to values of any specified type (again, conversion will be done on-the-fly). Just pure sweetness.
• jezuch.utils.io: currently contains only a ReaderSource interface and its two implementations (for files and URLs). It's nothing more than a factory for Readers.
• jezuch.utils.ini: a simple parser for INI files; Starmapper has historically used this format for configuration files. It's simple and popular (thanks to Microsoft, mostly), so why not? It parses the file and exposes it as a Set<INISection> [SIDENOTE: in Starmapper version 3 this simplicity gets a bit in the way of new unified configuration model employed by the two default applications, but it's a minor annoyance only].
• jezuch.utils.pcx: package name says it all. A PCX image encoder; formerly just a "dump-into-an-output-stream" class, now pluggable into IIO.

The Subversion repository contains two branches: trunk and experimental. The trunk contains utilities actually used by Starmapper, while the experimental branch contains additional classes and packages that I created for other purposes and may be useful. I recommend to check out the jezuch.utils.observable package - I hope you don't faint at the sight of the sources :)

So, if you're interested, check out the javadocs for trunk and experimental. There are also javadocs for 20070915 snapshot release.