For RvSnoop I’m currently working on adding namespaces to all of the files that are used to save the application preferences and also the project files. This is a Good Thing in and of itself, as it allows me to use XML Schema to validate and document the files formats. But, more importantly, it gives me the opportunity to refactor as I go alond, the general plan is to make the projects in the next release be based on directories rather than a single XML file, this will allow me to use a disk based storage mechanism for messages so that they will be persistent across sessions.

Playing Well With Others

At the same time, I’ve taken the opportunity to include some of the Apache Commons libraries in the build. There were (well, still are) a number of small utility classes scattered around which I’m planning on replacing with the versions from Apache. One side effect of this is that the build is increasing in size, to help control this I’m going to remove the Berkeley DB dependency from the build. I was origiannly planning to use this for the on disk message store but I’ve changed my mind here. My current thinking is to just write the messages out to files but to have a set of indexes (probably built using Lucene) as well for searching and sorting. There should be another (alpha) release out later this week with the Commons and Berkeley DB changes complete, and a release next week with the new project structure.