What cool frameworks are there on Java/Ruby etc. t

Question

I was just reading a post from Justin Etheredge in which he wrote "... I get so jealous when I talk to the Java guys at work and see all of the freaking awesome tools that they have for free on their platform. Since I use the NUnit, NCover, NHibernate, NAnt stack when doing most .NET development, sometimes I feel like we are just a bunch of copycats".

What other cool frameworks exist that aren't on .NET and I may not know about? Can we leave out things which have a direct or pretty reasonable analogue, just the kewl shiznit!

PS we aren't so bad. I'm pretty sure NDepend started out on .NET and has moved to Java

PPS one answer per item please! It makes it a lot easier to discuss them!

Answer 1

1. Liquibase - A library for tracking, managing and applying database changes.
2. A decent embedded webserver, such as Jetty
3. A build system equivalent to Maven
4. An embedded AD/LDAP server for development purposes, such as ApacheDS

Answer 2

At work, we use the ATG e-commerce platform, JBoss to run our local builds and Maven to build everything. We also have components from the Struts framework.

Personally speaking, I prefer the Spring Framework. IOC is my new favourite pattern!

Answer 3

Maybe you should ask the Java folks (add some Java tag), .NET tag watchers may not know about Java frameworks .NET does not have :)

Answer 4

http://www.terracotta.org/ A kind of distributed JVM which shares objects automatically across a farm. Or something. Reading http://willcode4beer.com/design.jsp?set=kill_your_db makes it sound pretty cool.

Answer 5

http://ruby.sadi.st/Heckle.html

Think you write good tests? Not bloody likely... Put it to the test with heckle. It’ll put your code into submission in seconds.

The premise is really really simple to understand:

★ Your tests should pass. ★ Break your code. ★ Now they should fail.

You could check this by hand, but why bother? Use heckle and put it to the test:

heckle -f ClassName

For each failure heckle points out, you've got a test to write.

Chances are, your tests suck.