I’m working with some Java wrappers for some CICS programs on our mainframe. I’ve been having a devil of a time getting the thing to work properly. In typical mainframe fashion, when it fails you get an ABEND and then some less-than-useful messages. Dig the one that I just got:

ECI_ERR_CICS_DIED

At least it was honest…

I installed Maven tonight and within about 20 minutes had one of my simple projects building with it. Once I create the project.xml file, running maven java:jar fetched, compiled and jarred everything into a ready-to-use jar file. Running maven site:generate generated an entire project website including developer information, code metrics and other useful stuff. Very nice indeed. And this after spending less than half an hour with it!

Whilst trying to use the nifty management console included with JRockit (supposedly the world’s fastest JVM), I recieved this error

COM.jrockit.common.util.AssertionFailedException: Received a weird y = 114 or weird time = 1041533639613 class = com.jrockit.console.ui.chart.DataSourceMemoryHeap

That’s the first time I’ve ever been told by a machine that something was “weird.”