I was looking for a good prototyping tool the other day and I came across ForeUI. This little gem packs quite a punch. Whether you want to create mockups of a desktop application or a web application, ForeUI has everything you need. A six minute demo of the application is available. ForeUI is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris.

The canvas where all the work is done is called a plot. Each plot can have 1 or more pages of mockups, similar to Microsoft Excel workbooks. To assist with prototyping of cross-platform applications, the mockups can be drawn in four different modes – Hand Drawing, Wire Frame, Windows XP, and Mac OS X. The canvas width and height can be adjusted and can even be made to look like wrinkled paper for that real hand-drawn prototype look.

Just about anything your imagination can come up with, can be mocked up. The palette comes with over 40 widgets and whatnots that can be used to mockup anything from a simple windows application to a complicated web site. Frequently used mockups such as dialogs and navigation panes can be saved as custom widgets in the palette. Go check out some screenshots and samples of the software in action. Anything placed on the canvas can have an action associated with it. This allows for the creation of an interactive mockup that can be used to simulate what the application will do in a real environment.

Plots can be exported as an image, PDF, or DHTML. A plot can be ran as a slideshow. In slideshow mode, the mockup can be marked up with a red pen. This mode is good for demonstrations and team discussions. Plots can also be run in a simulation mode. In simulation mode, a new window is opened in the default web browser. If any actions were setup for the mockup, such as clicking buttons and activating menus, those things can be interacted with in the browser window.

At $79 for a single user license, ForeUI is a great deal. There are also pricing plans for multiple users. A 7 day trial can be downloaded for evaluation.

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I like finding new useful java libraries. I usually find them from posts like this one. Other times I find them because I have a problem needing a solution. Here are some of my favorite unknown java libraries that I have found over the past year. Today I use every one of these in my projects. Interestingly, 4 of 6 are hosted on http://code.google.com.

Google-API-Translate-Java

Provides a simple, unofficial, Java client API for using Google Translate.  I use this to translate caption files for videos into several other languages. It has lots of options and has never failed me.

XmlTool

XMLTool is a very simple Java library to be able to do all sorts of common operations with an XML document with a very easy to use class using the Fluent Interface pattern to facilitate XML manipulations.

XStream

XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again. Also useful for creating JSON responses.

Architecture Rules

Architecture Rules leverages an xml configuration file and optional programmatic configuration to assert your code’s architecture via unit tests or ant tasks. This test is able to assert that specific packages do not depend on others and is able to check for and report on cyclic dependencies among your project’s packages and classes. Get cyclic dependency detection with the Maven 2 plugin and zero configuration.

CyberNeko HTML Parser

NekoHTML is a simple HTML scanner and tag balancer that enables application programmers to parse HTML documents and access the information using standard XML interfaces. This can be used to extract the textual content from an HTML fragment.

Charts4j

charts4j is a free, lightweight charts & graphs Java API. It enables developers to programmatically create the charts available in the Google Chart API through a straightforward and intuitive Java API.

What do you use?

Do you have any new and unknown java tools that you use that you would recommend we checkout?

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I recently needed to find a web site that offered version control services. I was having server issues and needed to find a reliable place to keep my code. Below is a list of sites that I found and some info about each one. Please add comments if you like or dislike any of these.

Note: The “cost” list below only shows the basic packages. Visit the sites for other plan details.

FREE – Version Control Hosts/Hosting

Cost – Version Control Hosts/Hosting (Basic Packages)

Version Control with Git (Amazon)


Pro Git (Amazon)

Practical Subversion, 2nd Edition (Amazon)



Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (Animal Guide)

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