For a project I needed to work out a way to make thumbnails/screenshots of HTML files for some Java code I was working on. From my research, I found a nice project called the The Flying Saucer Project which has an XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 renderer which works for what I needed for my project. Taking the HTML files and using JTidy to make them in to XHTML the renderer could output an image file for me.

A bit ago at work I was asked to help a customer with a solution for using the Lyris ListManager’s SOAP API with just HTTP Post calls. They just needed to see some sample code that they could use to re-write. SOAP is XML based, you send and get back XML. Just using HTTP Post you need to format the XML you are sending and then parse out the information you get back from the SOAP server.

Spam sucks and administrating a forum that is phpbb3 based you find there are a lot of bots that sign up and try to post spam. It’s a pain to go through by hand and remove them all due to some of them being really clever and looking like real people. This is where a great site like stopforumspam.com comes in to play. You are able to search users based on email, username and IP to check to see if they have been reported as a spammer before.

Update: New code using Battle.net’s REST API can be found here. This posting is similar to “Pulling data from the Warcraft Armory with Ruby” but with Groovy. For the people who are not familiar with Groovy Home it’s “Object-oriented language alternative for Java platform; Java-like syntax, dynamically compiles to JVM bytecodes” in other words it’s another language that gets compiled to JVM bytecodes like Jython (Python based) and JRuby (Ruby based), but unlike being based off another language, this is new take on the Java language.

Update: New code using Battle.net’s REST API can be found here. For the people that play World of Warcraft, you know there is a great site made by Blizzard that keeps all your characters and guild information called the armory. If you take a good look at the site you will see its XML being formatted by XSLT. This is really great for people that want to script something to pull data from the armory because XML is really easy to parse.