My new favorite toy is the Digester from Jakarta Commons. I first used it to store some information that I had strewn about a number of property files, and now I think I can use it for everything. Today I wrote a simple system that lets you create email templates as XML files and then turn them into email messages using the Digester. The nice thing about it is that it makes it really, really easy to map XML files into Java beans (or even hierarchies of Java beans). Lately, I’ve been very impressed with all sorts of things I’ve found that are part of the Jakarta Commons project, the HttpClient works really well too.