Tag Archives: java

Using the Google Closure Compiler in Java

I recently had a chance to try out Google's closure compiler. The closure compiler is similar to the YUI compressor except that along with minimizing it may rewrite the JavaScript. If you want to understand more about what it does start at the overview documentation and then go from there.

What I needed was a way to use the closure compiler in an Ant task. The Ant task that comes with the library is good but there wasn't a way for me to integrate it into an existing system that wasn't going to change. After looking around for some example code and not finding any I went into the library's Ant task and figured out how to wire it all up myself.

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Java AirPlay Client

Ever since getting one of the new AppleTV devices I have been wanting to fiddle with AirPlay. I finally got around to looking at a dump of the traffic between an iPad and the AppleTV over Christmas and was surprised at how simple it was. Soon after I noticed a blog post about AirFlick for the Mac. AirFlick was close to what I was wanting at the time but I really wanted something that would let me control AirPlay from Linux or Windows.

I decided to make something that could run anywhere so I created my own AirPlay client called AP4J. I used Java and a pure Java Bonjour implementation called JmDNS so AP4J can run anywhere Java runs.

The current version only has the ability to control an AirPlay device. That means you have to supply a location that has a compatible video (h264 encoded) but once playing you will have control over the video just as you would using the iPad or iPhone. The next step will be to add the ability to directly serve videos instead of only being able to control the playback of videos. My goal will be the ability to run AP4J on my Windows Home Media server where I can have it stream videos to my AppleTV.

I have tested AP4J on Linux, Windows and Mac but only extensively on Linux. I have also tested a number of sites that have compatible videos available, a few of those are listed here:

Now for a couple screen shots. This is what you see after starting the server and going to the web interface:

This is what it looks like when a video is playing:

AJAX file upload progress for Java using commons fileupload and prototype

This has been done before with PHP (AJAX upload progress meter for PHP) etc but I needed something a little different because I wanted to upload a file and then have it loaded into a database. I looked around and found that someone had already made something that used the commons file upload package to do the upload part (AJAX Upload progress monitor for Commons-FileUpload Example). It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it a good start.

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