I think I figured out when I started this blog: I was working at a now-defuct company, in the process of being wound down, doing build/qa/bugfixing for their sole product, an electronic bill-payment system implemented in Java. Looking over the sidebar items:
I used Jython and Python unittest as a replacement for Junit. Our Junit test suite consisted of hundreds of trivial tests (this was pre-JDK 1.5 Junit) that were ineffective at finding bugs. Jython allowed us to develop far more complex tests (especially those involving database access), without writing a huge amount of code.
I still use Jython, though not for new development. While it's actively supported, the cognitive switching between Python 2 and 3 (which I use extensively) is too painful.
Apache Torque generates DDL for several popular databases from an XML model. While it seems to have fallen by the wayside, I still use a customized version for generating DDL.
Apache Velocity- I use this on a daily basis. If you need a simple text templating engine without a fullblown language this is still a great choice.