Didn’t get as much accomplished over the long weekend as I’d hoped, what with having to do a from-scratch reinstall of the OS on my new machine. WinXP Professional. Hmm. Reinstalling everything seems to have sorted out the random twice-hourly spontaneous reboot problem though.

What I did get done:

Tried out Maven. Looks very good, if somewhat complex to get going initially. I like the idea that you can specify all your dependencies in one project file. What would be really good is if you could bootstrap an entire build process starting with just the project.xml file. Maybe it can, I haven’t looked into it in sufficient depth yet.

Started using TortoiseCVS (yet another fine recommendation from JoeW). Works very well, but for some reason I have to type my password in every time I want to do anything – it would be nice to have it cache it.

Mucked about with my toy project, ViewBeans a bit more. Knocked up a quick-n-dirty site using Maven, and got the code doing string replacements based on bean introspection (including nested beans), which is quite cool. Need to learn more about taglibs, and how it might be accessed from within a JSP, and possibly consider how to deal with subclasses.