August 2003 Java News

Sunday, August 31, 2003

Sun has posted the second public review draft specification of JSR 114, JDBC Rowset Implementations, to the JCP. "The JDBC RowSet implementations, as specified by JSR-114 (http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/114.jsp), define a set of implementations of the javax.sql.rowset interface. These implementations will be delivered in the core Java 2, Standard Edition , version 1.5." Comments are due by September 27.


Saturday, August 30, 2003

CMP has posted the Call for Papers for Software Development 2004 West. This conference will take place March 15-19, 2003, in Santa Clara. Once again I'll be chairing the XML track. However, there are also tracks covering Java, C++, Web Services, .NET. Architecture and Design, Wireless and Mobile computing, and more. Submissions are due by September 5.


Sun and IBM have posted the public review draft specification and technology compatibility kit for Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, the Portlet API. A portlet is like a servlet that produces only part of a page, rather than an entire page. For instance, you can imagine the quote of the day, the recommended reading, the news items, and the navigation column on the right hand side as all being produced by separate portlets whose output the server combines to form the page you're reading now. (That's not how this page is produced, but you can imagine it that way.)


Telecordia has posted the first public review draft of JSR-122, the JAIN JCAT Specification. The Java Advanced Intelligent Networking (JAIN) Coordination and Transactions (JCAT) specification defines a Java API for advanced session control. If you don't work for a phone company, you probably don't care about this. Comments are due by September 26.


Nokia has posted the proposed final draft of JSR-180, SIP API for J2ME, to the Java Community Process. This is a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) API for J2ME clients that enables SIP applications to be executed in memory limited devices, especially cell phones. SIP is used to establish and manage IP sessions for instant messaging, presence and gaming services.


Sun and the national Institute for Standards and Technologies (NIST) have released version 1.1 of the JAIN SIP specification. Changes include adding support for TCP as well as UDP, and changing the package name from javax.sip to jain.protocol.ip.sip (in complete violation of Sun's own package naming conventions, I'll note.) A reference implementation and technology compatibility kit are available on java.net.

Friday, August 29, 2003

BEA Systems has posted the proposed final draft of Java Specification Request (JSR) 173, Streaming API for XML (StAX), to the Java Community Process. This JSR proposes a Java-based, pull-parsing API for XML. StAX offers two approaches. XMLStreamReader and XMLStreamWriter are a cursor API designed to read and write XML as efficiently as possible. XMLEventReader and XMLEventWriter are an iterator API designed to be easy to use, event based, easy to extend, and allow easy pipelining. The iterator API sits on top of the cursor API.

There is a reference implementation bundled with the spec and JavaDoc. I haven't had time to write code with it yet, or to test the performance; but overall from the spec and JavaDoc I'd say this is the cleanest, most XML conformant pull parser I've seen to date. It's definitely a substantial improvement on XMLPULL. I'm giving the spec a thorough going over right now. So far my comments are mostly minor editorial issues. A few more major points:

But that's it. Most of my other comments were even more minor and editorial. Overall, this looks like a very nice API.


Steve Roy has released MRJ Adapter 1.0.1, an open source library that implements a unified API for developers to access Mac specific functionality built into the various versions of the Macintosh Runtime for Java (MRJ). MRJ Adapter enables devlopers to add Mac specific functionality to their applications without compromising the cross-platform nature of their application. MRJ Adapter also "incorporates many little tricks known only to seasoned Mac Java programmers, such as how to bring up a file dialog to pick a folder, or how to set up a menu bar when no frame is opened, which is a normal state for a Mac application that isn't natively supported by Java." Version 1.0.1 is a bug fix release. MRJ Adapter is published under the LGPL.


Timothy Wall has posted version 0.10 of the Abbot GUI testing framework has been released. New features in this release include

Abbot is published under the LGPL.


Brendan Macmillan's posted version 2.0.9.9 of Java Serialization for XML (JSX) 2, a library for converting Java objects into streams of XML and reading the objects back from the streams. To use it, replace ObjectOutputStream with JSX.ObjectWriter and ObjectInputStream with JSX.ObjectReader.

Thursday, August 28, 2003

Sun's released version 1.4.2_01 of the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Naturally this is a bug fix release.


Per Cederberg has released Grammatica 1.4, a C# and Java parser generator (compiler compiler) that "improves upon simlar tools (like yacc and ANTLR) by creating well-commented and readable source code, by having automatic error recovery and detailed error messages, and by support for testing and debugging grammars without generating source code. Grammatica supports LL(k) grammars with an unlimited number of look-ahead tokens." Grammatica is published under the GPL.


ej technologies has released the jclasslib bytecode viewer 2.0, an open source tool for visualizing and editing Java .class files. This is published under the GPL.

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Picture of a Cat, Tomcat logo The Jakarta Apache Project has released Tomcat 5.0.9, the servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). Tomcat 5.0 implements version 2.4 of the Java Servlet API 2.4 and version 2.0 of Java Server Pages.

The numbering is a little confusing. but this appears to be the first beta release in the 5.0 series. It should really be numbered 5.0b1. There's also a noticeable list of unimplemented features and bugs, which by my reckoning would make this more of a development release than even a beta. For the record

Of course, in a world where even the largest software vendor is willing to ship operating systems with thousands of known bugs, and mostly ignores bug reports submitted by external beta testers, these terms have lost some of their meaning. :-(


JCraft, Inc has posted JSch 0.1.7, a pure Java implementation of SSH2 that supports port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc. JSch is released under a BSD license. This is a bug fix release.


Scott Persinger has posted Jar Browser 0.9, an open source GUI application for searching across a set of jar or zip files. You cab browse all the jars in a directory or the CLASSPATH, search for classes by name across a set of jars, decompile classes inside a jar (using JAD), and search for text within the decompiled class listing. Jar Browser is published under the GPL.

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Bill Venners has posted the penultimate installment of his interview with me about XOM and API design at Software Development 2002 West last spring, Designing by Dictatorship, Examples, and Tests.


The FreeBSD foundation has released Caffe Diable, a port of the Java Development Kit 1.3.1 to FreeBSD. There's also Latte Diablo, a port of the Java Runtime Environment 1.3.1. This isn't open source, but "The FreeBSD Foundation has negotiated a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK)." The binaries work on 4.8, possibly other 4.x releeases, but not on FreeBSD 5.x. Work is ongoing to cure the incompatibility with 5.x.


Steve Roy has released MRJ Adapter 1.0, an open source library that implements a unified API for developers to access Mac specific functionality built into the various versions of the Macintosh Runtime for Java (MRJ). MRJ Adapter enables devlopers to add Mac specific functionality to their applications without compromising the cross-platform nature of their application. MRJ Adapter also "incorporates many little tricks known only to seasoned Mac Java programmers, such as how to bring up a file dialog to pick a folder, or how to set up a menu bar when no frame is opened, which is a normal state for a Mac application that isn't natively supported by Java." MRJ Adapter is published under the LGPL.

Monday, August 25, 2003

The JavaPLT group at Rice University has posted a new build of DrJava, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java that supports interactive evaluation of expressions. This release improves the interactive debugger and adds JavaDoc support. DrJava is published under the GPL and requires JDK 1.3 or later.


Lucas Bruand has released Just4Log, an open source library "enhance dynamically the performance of various logging systems inside a java application. Dynamically because the sourcecode in java is not modified but rather the optimization occurs on the compiled ByteCode files." Just4Log optimizes bytecode from log4j, Apache Commons, and JDK 1.4 java.util.logging. It can also automatically add "enter" and "exit" logs at every exit and entry point of methods. Just4Log is published under the Apache license.


Thomas Mueller has released LDBC (Liberty DataBase Connectivity), a JDBC driver that provides vendor-independent database access. Whereas JDBC offers a standard database interface for SQL statements, it does not attempt to account for differences in vendors' SQL implementations. LDBC takes the next step and attempts to map different vendors SQL dialects into a common language. so the same SQL code runs on different databases. LDBC is published under the GPL.


Hugues Pisapia and Marc Gimpel have posted JSpeex 0.8, an open source "Java port of the Speex speech codec (Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech). It provides both the decoder and the encoder in pure Java, as well as a JavaSound SPI." JSpeex is published under a BSD license.


Alexandre Brilliant has released JSyntaxColor 1.2, a €110 shareware Java library for coloring user text input in real time. JSyntaxColor supports Java, SQL, and Formula syntax out of the box, and can be customized for other languages.


Andrew Sorensen and Andrew Brown have released jMusic 1.4.2, an open source Java class library for generating and manipulating music intended for computer assisted composition. It provides a music data structure based on note/sound events. jMusic can read and write MIDI files, audio files, and its own .jm files. Version 1.4.2 adds a new compressor audio object, better handling of frequency pitches when writing MIDI files, audio envelopes that can cope with extremely short notes, and more real-time instruments. jMusic is published under the GPL.


Gaudenz Alder has released version 2.2.1 of JGraph, an open source graph component for Swing that requires Java 1.4 or later. JGraph is accompanied by Graphpad, an open-source diagram editor for Swing that offers Automatic Layout, Printing, Zoom, and much more. It is available in English, German and French. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release. JGraph is published under the LGPL.


debugtools.com has released version 3.1 of JDebugTool, a standalone graphical Java debugger built on top of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA). There are only a couple of minor user interface changes in this release. JDebugTool is $99 (personal)/$199 (corporate) payware.


Jim Menard has posted version 0.7.11 of DataVision, an open source "database reporting tool similar to Crystal Reports". DataVision is written in Java and supports multiple databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle. This release make some small user interface improvements.


Frederic Lavigne posted version 1.2.4 of his Skin Look And Feel for Java. SkinLF allows Java developers to use Skins (GTK and KDE themes) in their Swing applications. This release supports theming text component borders and JDK 1.4 frame decoration. It also provides theme converters to port themes written for other skin engines to SkinLF themepacks. Java 2 is required.


Julien Ponge has released IzPack 3.1.0b, an open source tool for building cross-platform installers in Java. This is a quick release to fix a bug "which occurred when generating a Kunststoff installer." It's published under the GPL.

Sunday, August 24, 2003

Linus Tolke has posted ArgoUML 0.14, an open source UML modelling tool written in Java. ArgoUML is published under a BSD license.

Saturday, August 23, 2003

David Hovemeyer has posted FindBugs 0.6.5, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release fixes a few bugs. Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.


Sun has posted the proposed final draft of Java Specification Request 188 (JSR-188), CC/PP Processing , to the Java Community Process (JCP). According to the draft spec,

As the variety of computing devices increases, there is a growing need for a flexible and application independent mechanism for capability negotiation between devices. CC/PP [CCPPWG] provides a standard way for devices to transmit their capabilities and user preferences. It was originally designed to be used when a device requests web content via a browser so that servers and proxies can customize content to the target device, i.e. support device independence [DIWG]. UAProf [UAProf], a concrete implementation of CC/PP developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), has two additional use cases. Firstly it is envisioned UAProf will be used for provisioning applications or media objects to devices as outlined in J2EE Client Provisioning [J2EECP]. Here the capability information can be used by the server in order to determine the most appropriate variant. Secondly UAProf can also used for push messaging [WAPPush] to pre-adapt the content before sending it to the device.

This specification defines a set of APIs that enable J2EE applications to process delivery context information in CC/PP. This will allow Java developers to write device independent code that can deliver content to a multitude of web access mechanisms while reducing development costs, and will help to avoid a proliferation of proprietary and potentially incompatible implementations. Web servers and applications will be able to use this API to optimally adapt content for individual access mechanisms. J2EE Client Provisioning servers will be able to use this API to help determine the appropriate client application to provision. Portal servers will be able to use this API to adapt content and pass on delivery context information to portlets that would adapt their behavior accordingly.

Comments are due by June 5.


Panasonic has posted two public review draft specifications for the Java Advanced Intelligent Networking (JAIN) project. JSR-164, JAIN SIMPLE Presence, "provides a standard portable and secure interface to manipulate presence information between a SIMPLE client (watcher) and a presence server (presence agent). SIMPLE is an extension of SIP to support presence and instant messaging." JSR-165, JAIN SIMPLE Instant Messaging, "provides a standard portable and secure interface to exchange messages between SIMPLE clients." Comments are due by August 31.

Friday, August 22, 2003

My DSL line is back up. It was out for about 26 hours total. I keep hearing recommendations for SpeakEasy, but that certainly hasn't been my experience with them. Outages like this one are far too common.


ObjectWeb has released Octopus 2.1, an open source, Java-based Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) tool that can connect to any JDBC data source and perform a transformation defined from an XML file. Octopus supports Ant and JUnit. Octopus is published under the GPL and LGPL.


IBM has revised the change log for the maintenance release of Java Specification Request (JSR) 921, Implementing Enterprise Web Services 1.1 in the Java Community Process (JCP). According to the introduction, "This specification defines the Web Services for J2EE architecture. This is a service architecture that leverages the J2EE component architecture to provide a client and server programming model which is portable and interoperable across application servers, provides a scalable secure environment, and yet is familiar to J2EE developers." New features for the next release include support for anonymous types and xsd:any. Comments are due by September 8.


Frank Karlstrøm has posted the second alpha of f-JCache 1.0, an open source caching system for Java database-based applications based on JSR-107 JCache API. f-JCache is published under the LGPL.

Thursday, August 21, 2003

I improved my worm filters by filtering out messages with nasty attachments instead of subject lines. This also gets rid of a lot of the messages from broken mail servers that bounce the worm back to the alleged sender, as well as those sent directly from infected machines. If you use procmail, you may be interested in these rules for your .procmailrc:

# filter Outlook-attached .pif files, move to ~/.worm_droppings
:0 B
* ^Content-Type: application/octet-stream
* ^.*name=".*.pif"
.worm_droppings

# filter Outlook-attached .scr files, move to ~/.worm_droppings
:0 B
* ^Content-Type: application/octet-stream
* ^.*name=".*.scr"
.worm_droppings

# filter Outlook-attached .exe files, move to ~/.worm_droppings
:0 B
* ^Content-Type: application/octet-stream
* ^.*name=".*.exe"
.worm_droppings

They dump all messages with .scr, .pif, or .exe attachments into a folder in your home directory called .worm_droppings. You can change .worm_droppings to /dev/null to delete them completely if you're confident these won't catch any legitimate mail. These seem to be working for me, but use at your own risk. These rules don't use a lock file, but probably should. Props to Jonathan Wilson for the idea.


On the other hand, my SDSL line has been down for 24 hours now and counting. A technician is supposed to come out sometime today before 7:00 P.M. to fix it. We shall see. I'm not optimistic. An unexpected side effect of the DSL outage is that I can no longer send e-mail from elharo@ibiblio.org or easily reply to messages sent to that address. I've got a bunch of messages queued up in my outbox that will be sent whenever this is fixed. If you're waiting for a response from me about something, it may be a couple of days before you hear from me. :-(

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

SOBIG.F was filling my inbox with crap yesterday. I kill-filed most of the subject lines. It's hard to believe people are still using Outlook, when there are so many better e-mail clients out there. What's even harder to believe is the number of mail servers that can't recognize a virus mail, and dump it automatically. And what's hardest to believe is that I'm still getting warnings that e-mail from me contained a virus. Any anti-virus vendor or system administrator who hasn't yet figured out that worms forge e-mail addresses is clearly incompetent, and should be locked in the stocks in the middle of the town square wearing a Microsoft Bob T-shirt so children will laugh and pelt them with AOL CDs. So far the incompetents include:

And, oh yes, I almost forgot the biggest offender:

These companies and people are all part of the problem, not part of the solution. On the positive side, Amika Guardian seems to be filtering out all the viruses directed at one of my accounts without hassling me or the alleged senders. Its spam filter isn't up to par with Spam Assassin's (in fact, it flags so many false positives that I had to turn it off weeks ago), but it's doing a good job with the worm.

To make matters worse, in an apparently unrelated problem, my SpeakEasy DSL line has been down for over four hours now, and shows no sign of coming back anytime soon, so I have to download the worm droppings over a dialup line if I want to read my e-mail. I'm on hold with SpeakEasy as I write this. At least one thing they do right: they don't interrupt the music every 15 seconds to thank me for holding. But otherwise I'm a very dissatisfied customer right now, and am considering switching ISPs. This is hardly the first time this has happened. Updates may be a little slow here until they fix this.

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Dragongate Technologies has released jSaluki 1.0.1, a small hyperelliptic curve cryptography library for Java published under the GPL. Algorithms include


David Hovemeyer has posted FindBugs 0.6.4, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release improves the detection of Strings compared with == and != operators, as well as detecting other reference types which should generally not be compared with ==and != operators such as Boolean and Integer. It also finds non-transient, non-serializable instance fields in Serializable classes. Various bugs are fixed. Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.


Nicholas Sushkin has released Javadoc Search 1.0.1, a CGI script written in Perl for indexing and searching HTML files produced by the JavaDoc tool. This is published under the GPL.


Websina has released BugZero 2.8.1, a $999 payware Web-based bug tracking system that supports multiple projects, group-based access, automatic bug assignment, file attachment, email notification, and metric reports. Bug Zero is written in Java and can run on top of various backend databases including MySQL. This appears to mostly be a bug fix release.

Monday, August 18, 2003

Sun is requesting public feedback on the next version of the Java Community Process. There will be two face to face meetings, one in Boston and one in Santa Clara. Possible changes include allowing greater public access earlier in spec development.

Sunday, August 17, 2003

Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.4.6 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This is a bug fix release.


Barak Naveh has posted JGraphT 0.5.0, an open source class library for graph-theory objects and algorithms. JGraphT is published under the LGPL.


Robert Oloffson has posted version 0.33 of Java Memory Profiler (JMP). JMP uses the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI) interface to track objects and method times in a JVM . It uses a GTK+ interface to display statistics. The current instance count and the total amount of memory for each class is shown as is the total time spent in each method. This release adds a heap size indicator in the heap graph and text fields that show the heap size, current usage, and filtered usage. JMP is written in C for Linux.


Julien Ponge has released IzPack 3.1.0a, an open source tool for building cross-platform installers in Java. This is a quick release to fix a bug "which occurred when generating a Kunststoff installer." It's published under the GPL.


The NetBeans Project has released a Chinese localized version of NetBeans 3.5.1, the open source Integrated Development Environment and Platform.

Friday, August 15, 2003

It's 6:43 P.M. here in New York as I type this. Power came about 30 minutes ago. I live in one of the last areas in New York to have its power restored. I survived the great blackout of 2003. Various supplies I'd stocked up on for Y2K disaster (that wasn't) finally got used, especially batteries. Something I'm adding to the emergency kit for the next time: a basic, old-fashioned phone that draws all its power from the phone line. Every landline phone I had in the house needed wall current to operate. The cell phone was useless until 5:30 this afternoon. :-(

I was home at 4:11 when the power went out, and my UPSs all worked like they're supposed to so I had time to shut down all the computers without damage. elharo.com, macfaq.com, and xom.nu all were down for the last 24 hours because they're hosted in my office with no emergency generator. They'll be back online shortly. It doesn't seem like a good idea to put a gasoline powered generator in my apartment. Anyone know of a reasonably priced fuel-cell system that could run a typical home for 24 hours or so?

Still for me, this was mostly an enforced break from work. I spent the last 24 hours reading comic books and walking around the neighborhood. Last night, the New York sky had the most stars I've ever seen here. Mars was easily visible with the naked eye. The night before the blackout, it wasn't even visible with binoculars. This morning in Prospect Park I saw the largest alligator snapping turtle I've ever seen in New York. That probably had nothing to do with the blackout, other than convincing me to walk around the park at 8:00 A.M. instead of checking my e-mail.

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Nokia has posted the proposed final draft specification of Java Specification Request (JSR) 184, Mobile 3D Graphics API for J2ME, to the Java Community Process (JCP). The goal is "an efficient 3D Graphics API suitable for the J2ME platform, in particular CLDC/MIDP. The API is targeted at CLDC class of devices that typically have very little processing power and memory, and no hardware support for 3D graphics or floating point math. The API has been defined such that implementations on that kind of hardware are feasible. However, the API also scales up to higher-end devices featuring a color display, a DSP, a floating point unit, or even specialized 3D graphics hardware."


Sun has released the finished specification of JSR-185, Java Technology for the Wireless Industry (JTWI), to the JCP. Quoting from the spec,

The goal of the JTWI specification is to improve the compatibility, interoperability and completeness of J2ME technology implementations in mobile phones. This specification raises the bar of functionality for high-volume devices while minimizing API fragmentation thereby broadening the already substantial base of applications that have been developed for mobile phones.

This specification achieves these goals in three ways.

  • First, it specifies a common set of essential APIs. In some cases, these APIs provide uniform access to services that were once only available through device specific APIs, or not at all.
  • Second, it mandates elements of the component specifications.
  • Third, some elements of the component specifications have been clarified within this specification.

The mandatory specifications incorporated into JTWI are:

In addition, the Mobile Media API Emulator (MMAPI) 1.1 (JSR-135) is conditionally required.

The technology compatibility kit (TCK) and Reference Implementation (RI) are not freely available. They must be licensed from Sun.


Nokia and Siemens have released the final version of Java Specification Request 195 (JSR-195), Information Module Profile, a J2ME profile for networked devices that do not have graphical display capabilities.


Sun has also posted the public review draft specification of JSR 114, JDBC Rowset Implementations, to the JCP. "The JDBC RowSet implementations, as specified by JSR-114 (http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/114.jsp), define a set of implementations of the javax.sql.rowset interface. These implementations will be delivered in the core Java 2, Standard Edition , version 1.5."


Linus Tolke has released the first beta of ArgoUML 0.14, an open source UML modelling tool written in Java. ArgoUML is published under a BSD license.

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

The Apache Project has released version 1.5.4 of Ant, the popular XML based, open source build tool for Java. This release improves compatibility with the javah task in Java 1.4.2 and with Visual Age for Java.


The Jakarta Apache Project has released the Commons FileUpload component. "FileUpload makes it easy to add robust, high-performance, file upload capability to your servlets and web applications. FileUpload parses HTTP requests that conform to RFC 1867, 'Form-based File Upload in HTML'. That is, if an HTTP request is submitted using the POST method, and with a content type of 'multipart/form-data', then FileUpload can parse that request, and make the results available in a manner easily used by the caller."


Julien Ponge has released IzPack 3.1.0, an open source tool for building cross-platform installers in Java. It's published under the GPL. This release adds number of small improvements including the ability to use standalone compiler was added, an overall progress inn InstallPanel, a CompilePanel, and OS dependent packs.


Code Weasels has posted JSP TestRunner, a free-beer Java Server Pages (JSP) tag library for running JUnit test cases/suites from a JSP page.


IBM's alphaWorks has released the JAR Class Finder, an Eclipse plug-in for finding JAR files containing a given class for the Java build path of a project, thus helping fix NoClassDefFound errors.


AlphaWorks has updated the Jikes Bytecode Toolkit, a pure Java class library "that enables Java programs to create, read, and write binary Java class files and to query and update a single, high-level representation of the collection of them, including relationships among them. These features allow the development of tools that report on what APIs the classes use, reorder and change instructions, merge or extend classes, add customized instrumentation (similar to profilers), analyze control and data flow, etc." This release fixes bugs, improves performance, adds two new sample programs.


AlphaWorks has also updated the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4, a Java class library for working with MPEG-4 video and audio. This is currently only available under a 90-day trial license.

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Bill Venners has posted two more installments of his interview with me about XOM and API design at Software Development 2002 West last spring:


The printed book is due out next month, but the Unicode Consortium has posted the complete book in PDF format on its website. Unicode 4.0 adds 1,226 new characters including "currency symbols, additional Latin and Cyrillic characters, the Limbu and Tai Le scripts; Yijing Hexagram symbols, Khmer symbols, Linear B syllables and ideograms, Cypriot, Ugaritic, and a new block of variation selectors (especially for future CJK variants). Double diacritic characters were added for dictionary use."


In related news, the Unicode Consortium has posted the first beta of Unicode 4.0.1 (the data files, not the book). "This is the first update of Unihan.txt since Unicode 3.2, and it includes a large number of corrections and additions. There are several other minor changes to other data files." Comments are due by August 18, 2003.


Alexander Ananiev has released MockEjb, an open source lightweight framework for running Enterprise Javabeans outside of the container for purposes of unit testing. MockEjb supports most of javax.ejb interfaces. MockEJB is published under the Apache Software License


Greg Guerin has released his open source Authorization Toolkit for Java, "a simple facade over an arbitrary authorization and authentication service. The API allows a Java program to exercise special privileges, such as the ability to run another program with elevated access privileges, i.e. as root." This release includes a Java native Interface (JNI) Mac OS X implementation based on Authorization Services.

Monday, August 11, 2003

Sun's posted the second release candidate of JavaHelp 2.0 on the Java Developer Connection (registration required). New features since JavaHelp 1.0 include enhancements to merging, multi topic printing, improved secondary window and popup usage, JFC ToolTip HelpSet support, HelpSet presentation controls and additional Navigators.


The Object Refinery has posted version 0.9.11 of JFreeChart, an open source library based on Java2D. JFreeChart can produce pie charts, line charts, various kinds of bar charts, XY plots and scatter plots, time series, high/low/open/close charts, candle stick charts, and combination charts. This release adds box-and-whisker plots and fixes assorted bugs. JFreeChart is published under the LGPL.


David Hovemeyer has posted FindBugs 0.6.3, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release mostly focuses on improving the build system. It also fixes various small bugs. Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.


Gaudenz Alder has released version 2.2.1 of JGraphPad, an open-source diagram editor for Swing that can create flow charts, maps, UML diagrams, and networks with thousands of nodes. Version 2.2.1 adds collaborative diagramming so mutliple people can work on a diagram simultaneously. It is available in English, German and French. JGraphPad is published under the LGPL.


Sunday, August 10, 2003

The Jakarta Apache Project has released version 4.1.27 of Tomcat, the servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). Version 4.1.27 closes several security holes. All 4.1 users should upgrade.


The NetBeans Project has released version 3.5.1 of the open source NetBeans Integrated Development Environment and Platform. This is the first release available in a Japanese localized version. (English, French, and Russian are also available.) The font size has been increased throughout to support an eventual Chinese version. Otherwise, there aren't any major changes in this release. If you're happy with 3.5 in English, French, or Russian, there's little reason to upgrade.


Saturday, August 9, 2003

The Gnu Project has released version 3.3.1 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC contains frontends for C, C++, Objective C, Chill, Fortran, Ada, and Java as well as libraries for these languages. Changes to the Java compiler since the previous 3.2.3 release include JDBC 3.0, assertions, and a speedier bytecode interpreter. GCC is a clean room implementation of Java that doesn't use any Sun code, so it doesn't always exactly match Sun release versions, but this is roughly at the Java 1.4 level with some omissions. Javawise, this release fixes various bugs.


Version 1.3 of BlueJ, a free integrated development environment (IDE) for Java aimed at education, has been released. The major new feature in 1.3 is a project submission extension developed at the University of Kent in Canterbury that enables students to submit BlueJ projects via file copy, email, ftp or http. Furthermore, the debugger supports multithreaded applications.

Tuesday, August 4, 2003

Greetings from South Florida. The birds here are fabulous. Adding to your life list down here is about as challenging as walking through the Bronx Zoo aviary. Yesterday we spotted the relatively uncommon reddish egret, among flocks of pelicans, egrets, cormorants, and ibises.

Reddish egret
standing in water

Since I've been down here, we've spotted at least five birds that aren't even in the Audubon Guide (Eurasian colored dove, ground dove, boat-tailed grackle, black vulture, and scarlet ibis). My wife's sleeping in this morning, and this hotel doesn't charge too much for a call to the local dialup number so I'm taking the time to update the site.


David Hovemeyer has posted FindBugs 0.6.2, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. New features in this release include

Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.


Version 1.1.1 of the Kaffe open source Java virtual machine for various Unixes has been released. According to developer Jim Pick, "As this is a development release, it is essentially a snapshot of what's happening in CVS, with limited testing. Even though this is not a production release, it contains a lot of improvements over 1.0.7, which was release over half a year ago. I anticipate that most people will have less trouble with this release." New features in 1.1.1 include:


Slava Pestov has uploaded the fourth pre-release of jEdit 4.2, an open source programmer's editor written in Java with extensive plug-in support and my preferred text editor on Windows and Unix. New features in this release include improved syntax highlighting for NSIS2, Ruby, and Pike. Regular expressions have been sped up. In addition many bugs were fixed.


Older news:

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April April, 2003 April, 2002 April, 2001 April, 2000 April, 1999 April, 1998
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Copyright 2003 Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Last Modified August 19, 2003