I keep coming up with ideas for blog posts, but never end up writing them. So, I've decided to use write or die to try and get ideas out there, with only a little bit of polish.
The first idea here is the Java shell tool. I probably won't get around to implementing it, but it's pretty neat.
Reflection in Java gives you a lot of runtime flexibility. Java is not usually used as a scripting language, but you should be able to quickly make an interesting amount of Java "command line" accessible with a couple reflection calls. I'll call this command line access tool "javait". We want javait to pass stuff around through pipes, we can do that through serialization. I think a good default is that javait instances pass around a single List