I’ve been teased that my current project has more external libraries than it does actual lines of code. Now, I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing – I’ve said before that the hardest thing about leaving Java for some other language would be giving up all of the 3rd-party libraries and projects that do 90% of your work for you.

Today’s is JAMon, a small library with a really simple purpose: keep track of performance statistics. I’ve written static classes or singletons that keep track of min, max and average times for various things on several projects; this just keeps me from having to write it again. Not saving a ton of time, but saving some. And here is a simple step-by-step for integrating it into Spring as an interceptor. There are several discussions out there for how to use JAMon with Spring, and whether Spring’s built-in JAMon interceptor (is there anything Spring doesn’t have built in?) should use logging semantics to activate it, but the one above is simply the XML to cut and paste into Appfuse’s Spring config, which is all I really want. I understand what it does, it’s just saving me the five minutes of thinking about it. Which is what I’m after. It’s just a beautiful feeling when you want something done, no matter how small, and find that it’s already been done for you. Like realizing you want another cup of coffee and finding a steaming mug already on your desk.

With that said, I’m going to go make some coffee now…