Writing OpenSource code has been one of my priorities. I have been doing it for years now. This is the story of how it all began.

2003

Before joining in a tech job, many people told me how routine tech job is. People give requirements, and the techies translate it to working code. This was frightening to me! So I decided, I will do all the mundane programming work quickly using automated scripts. I developed a TextEditor for this purpose. It was completely scriptable using BeanShell. This probably is my first OpenSource application. The Java package name started with com.indiwiz.*. The application was shared to the world from my site indiWiz.com.

2005-6

I had a huge collection of porn, and I was sharing my computer with my family. The system had dual boot with both Windows and Linux. I wanted a cross-platform application which would enable me to encrypt and decrypt my precious downloads. During free moments in office, I started exploring encryption and security. This resulted in the WizCrypt project. I learned a great deal when writing this project. This is the only project I have worked on which involved file-format design. For this project I did not want to have the package name starting with com.indiwiz.*. I found the com to be misleading of the purpose. I wanted a package name starting with org. Luckily, I came up with the name WizTools.org, and more luckily, it was available for registration. I grabbed it. Since that date, all my OpenSource work has been branded under this label.

2007

At this time I was working in SpikeSource with an interesting team. I started RESTClient project for testing RESTful WebServices. This was developed in collaboration with Ravi Subramanian (we lost Ravi in a accident in 2008). His sudden demise was a shock to me. This is the most popular product from the WizTools.org stable. It has the maximum community inputs. To broadcast updates of the WizTools.org project, I anticipated a need for a dedicated blog. Thus was wiztools.blogspot.com born.

Present

This is the period during which huge amount of effort and time was spent by me to stabilize and popularize RESTClient. I also started the WizTools.org mini-projects. The mini-projects was created to host all simpler applications without involving the cost (in terms of time) of creating a new project and associated repositories and mailing lists. At the time of writing, the mini-project hosts around 14 released tools/components, and few other productivity tools like JEdit macros and bookmarklets. We also have started some interesting new projects like Java Portlets (reusable JSR-286 portlets) and The Great Wall (micro-blogging web-application) recently.

Now, looking back at the projects available at WizTools.org, I recollect beautiful stories of my own needs for these projects. And the efforts my collaborators and I put to bring them in place.

Today I worked on setting up my URL redirection servlet (download) in our office to share internal links with my colleagues. I deployed it in JBoss. When I deployed this module as r.war, JBoss complained saying java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Prefix string too short. I renamed the war as redir.war and deployed it.

When I tried accessing the JBoss URL from another system in the network, I found that JBoss was not accepting connection from other systems in the network. Then I configured Apache to use ProxyPass:

ProxyPass /r http://localhost:1111/redir
ProxyPassReverse /r http://localhost:1111/redir

Note: JBoss was listening in port 1111 in my case. I added this to my apache configuration and restarted Apache. Now I have a cute URL shortening service which is accessible as http://myhost/r/<string>.

Download it!