regexxer

danielk‘s regexxer may be a killer-app. It does multi-file search-and-replace, using regular expressions. It shows the power of GUIs by giving visual feedback every step of the way – it tells you which files will be affected, highlights the search matches and gives a preview of the changed text. No more worrying about whether you got that command-line command correct before processing hundreds of files. I always needed regexxer and now it exists. I hear it’s in debian already.

I’ve been struggling with jakarta-tomcat and cocoon recently, on a hosted server that I’ve created for just this purpose. It is so difficult to install these things – the documentation is awful. I have given up connecting tomcat to apache, though it used to be simple, and I’ve given up getting the Cocoon Portal to work. It’s a real pity because the idea sounds great and I’m sure customers would like to pay for websites built on that kind of architecture. It’s frustrating – if it was a C++ project then I’d just fix it, but I’m not confident enough with Java/JSP these days.