Asciidoctor for collaborative book writing
Imagine having a tool that can automatically detect JPA and Hibernate performance issues. Wouldn’t that be just awesome?
Well, Hypersistence Optimizer is that tool! And it works with Spring Boot, Spring Framework, Jakarta EE, Java EE, Quarkus, or Play Framework.
So, enjoy spending your time on the things you love rather than fixing performance issues in your production system on a Saturday night!
I’ve been searching for the most suitable tools I’d use for my book writing process, and I’ve settled for Asciidoctor.
In the first place, I decided to use a markup text language that’s implicitly supported by GitHub, and after reviewing Markdown and Asciidoc, I opted for the latter for it offers a richer syntax.
The only problem with Asciidoc is Windows. The a2x command uses xmllint, and therefore you must use Cygwin or a virtual machine with a Linux image. This is not what I aim for, and therefore I continued evaluating git-scribe.
This is a tool meant for writing ebooks, and it’s pretty cool unless you use it on Windows. After manually installing all its dependencies (ruby, asciidoc, xsltproc, source-highlight, apache fop), I somehow managed to generate an HTML book example, but the PDF generation didn’t work. The Apache FOP classes were not found, and since I’m no Ruby expert, I simply gave up and decided to try Asciidoctor.
Running on Ruby, Asciidoctor simply works like a charm. I managed to install a Ruby file watcher that automatically generates the HTML version of my markups. PDF works and the syntax doesn’t scare me a bit. There are small differences between the original AsciiDoc and the new Asciidoctor, but that’s neglectable.
