As I’ve been recently given a task to “copy & paste” all our properties into an specific document on google docs – that the client wanted to use in order to translate these properties into other languages. Of course I decided NOT to do this by hand – but script it – and that’s how props2xls came to be.

It’s an Groovy + Java app that traverses an directory searching for *.properties files, and then matches their names together – and extracts their Locale from the filenames. Next, those strings are uploaded into an specified Google Spreadsheet. You can use any google account + password anc choose which spreadsheet/worksheet should be filled out with your data.

Note that the bottleneck here is the inserting into the Spreadsheet. This can be easily and very much improved as one may use Batch inserts. But as it’s just a proof-of-contept, I didn’t actually care for the time being ;-)

Here are some useful links if this post got you interested in this API:

• http://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/
• http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/java_client_lib.html#linux

As all programmers… you’d also probably want to check out the source – so here (on github) it is. But be warned, it’s very low quality as it’s just been hacked on for a few hours today at night (after midnight… ;-)).

—- the UPDATE —-

As you’ve probably noticed. In the first version I was using cell-by-cell updated. Each of them would fire an HttpRequest… And that is very expensive. So… I’ve rewritten some of the code to enable Batch updates. Goodle APIs support is quite well and I’m happy with the end result (as seen in the above movie).

There is a bug in the Java Client Library from 2.0 up though… When creating the SpreadsheetService use the following code, or you’ll run into some weird bugs at runtime:

PS: One might call it an proof-of-concent, as the code is quite ugly but it was written in about 3-4hours. And will probably spare us a lot of time if some client wants to translate our properties once again… ;-)

PPS: Did you know that on the netbeans.edu.pl website, I used the Google Data API for Picasa to develop the gallery?

At work I’m working on an Ubuntu 10.4 (love you guys for getting me a PC with Linux without making a fuss about it!) my laptop is on Fedora 13 i586 and my home PC is running Fedora 13 x64. Thank goodnes they’re all linux… ;-) The problem is was that the Google Web Toolkit plugin isn’t working with Firefox 3.6.4 on an x64 system on linux! So… can’t I develop GWT stuff on my super powerful home PC? Of course I can, the only thing I needed to do, is to get the latest sources for the plugin and compile it for myself ;-) Here’s how:

And we’re done — off to GWT development!

I’m coding this project to get used to some of the basic JEE stuff, such as Hibernate for example (it is quite amazing and very elegant – especially HQL), and to have a good time while coding in Java…

The source is avaiable under the AGPLv3 on github: http://github.com/ktoso/gwt-crossword
At some places it is still a mess so please keep in mind that it’s still under initial development (and I’m having a tough time at the uni and can’t code gwt-crossword everyday :\), that aside, feel free to take a look on the source!