Erik previously on: "#298 The bld Power User", running a high-traffic link blog using JSP and Tomcat, challenges with caching and performance, meeting Geert Bevin through discussions about URL encoding, evaluating and migrating his blog to the Rife framework, appreciating Rife's lean architecture and built-in utilities, the appeal and disappointment of Ruby on Rails, using lightweight Java application servers like Glassfish and Payara, avoiding heavy dependencies and XML configuration, generating XML with xdoclet, the advantages of Rife's templating system and code readability, Erik's journey with Kotlin and reasons for returning to Java, building a Kotlin URL encoding library with multiplatform support, the power of Kotlin's multiplatform capabilities, discussing the BLD build tool and its origins in simplifying build processes, the complexities of modern Java builds with dependencies compared to the simplicity of Java EE, considering Ant as an alternative to Maven, the idea of "Build as Code" and integrating build logic into applications, Erik's experience converting over 60 projects to bld, challenges of introducing new build tools in enterprise environments, Erik's automated blog posting system

ethauvin on twitter: @Erik C. Thauvin