XSL Engine

Amazingly, some bright minds of the company I work at supported the idea to release one of our products as an open source software. It's nice to see a huge "Nothing is Free" business opening up a little. I'm proud to present the release of the XSL Engine:

XSLE at Google Code

XSL Engine is an XSL transformation server and client. It provides united processing of XSL transformations, independent of any programming environment. This can remove load from other applications. It features high throughput, with the possibility to increase the throughput of the XSL transformations by setting up new servers. It operates in an Apache Tomcat Web container. XSL documents are loaded into cache. XSL Includes are supported. PDF can be generated (using XSL-FO). XSL cache can be automatically replicated among remote servers.

Getting Unicode output in Eclipse Console

Tired of seeing garbled Eclipse Console output? Here is a quick and dirty tutorial for getting Unicode output in Eclipse Console.

Fact: You will not get Unicode output in Eclipse Console while using System.out directly in Windows. See Eclipse BUG #13865.

1. add -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 to your eclipse.ini

2. make sure your Eclipse Console font supports Unicode. You can try it out by typing unicode characters directly to console with keyboard. Console Font is set in Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> Colors and Fonts -> Debug -> Console Font

3. if you are NOT using Windows, set your system encoding to UTF-8. You should now see Unicode characters in Console after restarting Eclipse.

4. if you are using Windows or do not want to change your OS encoding, you will have to avoid using System.out stream directly. Instead, wrap it up with java.io.PrintStream:
PrintStream sysout = new PrintStream(System.out, true, "UTF-8");
sysout.println("\u2297\u0035\u039e\u322F\u5193");

5. if you are using Log4J with ConsoleAppender, make sure to set the encoding property to UTF-8. Example:
#TRACE appender
log4j.appender.stdout.trace=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.trace.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.trace.encoding=UTF-8
log4j.appender.stdout.trace.layout.ConversionPattern=%p [%c] - %m%n
log4j.appender.stdout.trace.Threshold=TRACE

Happy development!