XMLC is working fine now. The error message I got was quite cryptic, but once I figured it out it wasn't so bad. Everything (Tomcat, JBoss, XMLC) was using its own XML parser, but the XMLC one was getting "buried" in the classpath. Once I put the Xerces parser sufficiently early in the cp, everything worked fine. (Frustrating, tho.)
It doesn't seem as if anyone on here is working on it, but Ant (in the Apache Jakarta project) is great! It's a pure Java replacement for make and is very easy to extend with new tasks. I was able to dope out the interface, create a new task (concatenating files/messages) and learn the basics of Java file IO in a relatively short time. (Hey, I hadn't had to deal directly with files yet!)
I recently rewrote box handling for OpenInteract -- much easier now and I implemented a standard box interface on a per-theme basis. I'll probably go back down to Washington for another training session in a couple of weeks.
And I've been at my current job long enough that I now have a looming deadline. Long days and nights await...
(Originally posted elsewhere)