I've started to autogenerate permalinks for each day's news, as I've been doing for a couple of months now on Cafe con Leche. An XSLT stylesheet launched every hour on the hour by a cron job screen scrapes this page to extract the day's news and store it in its own file. It may be a few days before I have all the kinks worked out of the system. The actual permalink is found at the bottom of the today's news section. The format for these URLs is http://www.cafeaulait.org/oldnews/newsYYYYMonthDD.html. For example, the URL for today's news is http://www.cafeaulait.org/oldnews/news2003October31.html.
Cinnabar Systems has released Canner, a $399 payware tool that "protects Java-based applications from decompilation and reverse engineering by embedding an encrypted version of the application's classes and resources into a native Windows executable." Because Canner does not use its own virtual machine, instead relying on a locally installed one, one wonders if it would really be that hard to hack a VM to dump the decrypted classes out to disk. Canner runs on Winodws NT 4.0/2000/XP. Canned applications can run on Windows 98 and later.
Cinnabar Systems has also released Cinnabar License Manager (CLM), a $299 payware library that "enables Java programs to easily enforce licensing terms at runtime. CLM supports licensing restrictions based on product name, feature name, domain name, network adapter MAC address, expiration date, and days since first use." CLM uses digital signatures to prevent the license file from being modified. CLM requires Windows 98 and Java 1.2 or later.
The Apache Software Foundation has launched Geronimo, a project to develop an open source, Apache-licensed implementation of the J2EE specification to be certified as J2EE compliant. Participation is solicited.
Sun has posted, version 1.2.2_017/17 of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE). This is a bug fix release of the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.2 for Windows, Linux, and Solaris.
Sun has also posted version 1.4.1_05 of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE). This is a bug fix release of the JDK and JRE 1.4.1 for Windows, Linux, and Solaris. It's not clear why anyone might to use this instead of 1.4.2.
Websina has released BugZero 3.2.1, 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. 3.2.1 can now integrate with Perforce.
Lots of new specification releases in the Java Community Process (JCP) to catch up with today. I also noticed that Sun appears to have revised its download process for specs, so it finally works with Mozilla again for the first time in months.
First off, Sun and IBM have released the the Portlet API specification. 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.)
Sun has released the
Generic Connection Framework Optional Package for J2SE specification.
"The Generic Connection Framework (GCF) Optional Package for J2SE will permit applications that rely on the GCF in J2ME to migrate to J2SE."
Essentially, this means adding
javax.microedition.io package from J2ME to
the regular JDK.
Sun has released the Java Management Extension (JMX) Remote API 1.0 specification and reference implementation. Quoting from the spec,
Java Specification Request (JSR) 3 [JSR3] defines the JMX specification. What is standardized by JSR 3 is the way in which resources are instrumented within a management agent based on Java technology, and a certain number of agent-local services based on that instrumentation. Although JSR 3 defines terminology for remote access to instrumentation, it does not standardize any particular remote access API or protocol. Many solutions exist for exporting JMX API instrumentation either through existing management protocols such as the simple network management protocol (SNMP) or through proprietary protocols. This JSR (JSR 160) standardizes one such solution.
Sun has released the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Client Provisioning Specification. According to the introduction,
This specification defines an extension to the Java 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform that is targeted at enabling J2EE application servers with facilities for building provisioning applications. The server running provisioning applications is known as a provisioning server. A provisioning server allows a variety of client devices to discover services and to have them delivered to the device.
This specification defines the programming API that developers use to write provisioning applications, and a packaging format to enable seamless addition of services that the provisioning server will provision.
For the purposes of this specification, the term provisioning refers to the activities of advertising client services to a client device, and to the process of delivering the service to the device. The physical form of a client service that is delivered to a client device is referred to throughout this document as a client bundle, or sometimes just a bundle. A bundle may take the form of an archive file containing Java byte code and the resources it uses, a file containing a screen saver, other media or other executable.
IBM has posted the proposed final draft specification for Java Specification Request 86 Enterprise Media Beans on the Java Community Process site. Enterprise Media Beans are a framework for integrate multimedia data into applications based on EJB Entity Beans within J2EE.
Finally, Sun has posted the maintenance review change log for the Java Network Launching Protocol and API (a.k.a. Java Web Start) specification. New features include allowing applications to provide more hints for shortcut preferences, virtual machine arguments, and so forth. Comments are due by November 24.
Microsoft's Longhorn developer site is now live. Longhorn is the next version of Windows, due out sometime in the next decade or two.
The second beta of Ant 1.6, the popular open source build tool, has been posted by the Apache Project. "Ant 1.6 adds a lot of new features, most prominently support for XML namespaces as well as a new concept of Ant libraries that makes use of namespaces to avoid name clashes of custom tasks." Java 1.2 or later is required. Java 1.1 is no longer supported.
Bodo Tasche has posted JCalendar 0.6, an open source calendar GUI widget for Java that "provides a ComboBox (JCalendarComboBox) for selecting a Date and a simple Panel (JCalendarPanel) for showing and editing a Date." JCalendar is published under a BSD license.
Slava Pestov has uploaded the sixth 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 Apache httpd.conf and MCS51 (8051) microcontroller assembly syntax highlighting and improved syntax highlighting for XSLT and Scheme. In addition many bugs were fixed.
The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons-Pool 1.1. This open source component is a a generic object pooling interface, a toolkit for creating modular object pools, and several general purpose pool implementations.
The Apache Jakarta Project has also released Commons-DBCP 1.1. This open source component provides database connection pooling services.
The Jakarta Apache Project has posted the first release candidate of Cactus 1.5, a simple framework for unit testing server-side Java code such as servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans, tag libraries, etc. New features since 1.4.1 include
begin()andend()methods that run before and after each test on the client side- Special Jetty integration to automatically start Jetty when executing a test suite
- Form-based authentication
- Internationalziation support
- A new JspTagLifecycle class to help unit test taglibs
- Support for JBoss in Ant integration
- Server-side XSLT when running Cactus tests from a browser
- cactifywar and cactus Ant tasks
- Pure JUnit tests canm be run "seamlessly" on the server
Sun has released the Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.3. This includes the reference implementation for JAXB 1.0 as well as
- Java Server Faces 1.0EA4
- Java Server Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.1 EA
- XML and Web Services Security 1.0EA2
- Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 1.0.2
- Java API for XML Messaging (JAXM) 1.1.1
- Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.2.4
- Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) 1.0.5
- Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) 1.1
- SOAP with Attachments API for Java (SAAJ) v1.2
- JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.0.3
- Java WSDP Registry Server 1.0_06
- Ant Build Tool 1.5.4
- Apache Tomcat 5.0 dev container
Version 1.3 now supports the WS-I basic profile 1.0. It also fixes assorted bugs.
Ej-technologies has released Install4j 2.0, a $598 payware cross platform tool for building native installers and application launchers for Java applications.
Christian Lorenz has released the JavaBluetooth Stack,
a Java implementation of the Bluetooth specifications 1.1 that uses the
javax.comm API to address the local Bluetooth hardware. This requires the native driver to expose the BlueTooth as a serial port.
The Java BlueTooth Stack is published under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Robert Oloffson has posted version 0.36 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 monitor dump parsing and a window that shows the current monitors, and semi-automatic deadlock detection. JMP is written in C for Linux.
Michael B. Allen has posted jCIFS 0.7.15,
an SMB client library written in pure Java. It
supports Unicode, named pipes, batching, multiplexing I/O of threaded callers, encrypted authentication, full transactions, domain/workgroup/host/share/file enumeration, NetBIOS sockets and name services, the smb:// URL protocol handler, RAP calls, and more. The API is similar to
java.io.File. This release makes
the name service code rotate through domain controllers to increase the scalability of the NTLM HTTP authentication filter.
jCIFS is published under the LGPL.
Microsoft has posted a draft spec for C# 2.0. New features include generics, iterators, anonymous methods, and partial classes.
IBM's alphaWorks has released HeapRoots, a tool for debugging memory leaks in Java applications through analysis of "heap dumps." Examples of analysis include:
- searching/filtering of individual objects
- summary/tabulation of the various types of objects
- statistics on heap address space (such as gaps between objects)
- inward and outward references of an object
- paths between two objects
- exploring the heap from source/root objects by following references
- calculation of objects reachable by an object
- calculation of objects kept alive by an object.
Websina has released BugZero 3.2, 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. 3.2 makes a couple of small performance improvements and user interface fixes.
The Apache Jakarta Commons Team has released Commons/Net 1.1 (formerly known as ORO NetComponents), a suite of internet protocols implemented in Java including Finger, Whois, TFTP, Telnet, POP3, FTP, NNTP, SMTP, Time and Echo. "The purpose of the library is to provide fundamental protocol access, not higher-level abstractions. Therefore, some of the design violates object-oriented design principles. Our philosophy is to make the global functionality of a protocal accesible (e.g., TFTP send file and receive file) when possible, but also provide access to the fundamental protocols where applicable so that the programmer may construct his own custom implementations (e.g, the TFTP packet classes and the TFTP packet send and receive methods are exposed)." This release fixes assorted bugs, and adds support for several additional NNTP commands.
David Hovemeyer has posted FindBugs 0.7.0, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release adds a -conserveSpace option to reduce memory use at the expense of analysis precision. A few random bugs are fixed as well. Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.
The JBoss Project has released JBoss 3.2.2, an open source Enterprise JavaBeans application server implemented in pure Java. (The home page is not yet updated, but the downloads page is.) This is a bug fix release, no new features. JBoss provides JBossServer, the basic EJB container and JMX infrastructure, JBossMQ for JMS messaging, JBossMail for mail, JBossTX for JTA/JTS transactions, JBossSX for JAAS based security, JBossCX for JCA connectivity, and JBossCMP for CMP persistence. It integrates with Tomcat Servlet/JSP container and Jetty Web server/servlet container, and enables you to mix and match these components through JMX by replacing any component you wish with a JMX-compliant implementation for the same APIs. Java 1.3 or later is required.
IBM's alphaWorks has released version 2.0.1 of ABLE, the Agent Building and Learning Environment. "The ABLE framework provides a set of Java interfaces and base classes used to build a library of JavaBeans called AbleBeans. The library includes AbleBeans for reading and writing text and database data, for data transformation and scaling, for rule-based inferencing using Boolean and fuzzy logic, and for machine learning techniques such as neural networks, Bayesian classifiers, and decision trees. Developers can extend the provided AbleBeans or implement their own custom algorithms. Rule sets created using the ABLE Rule Language can be used by any of the provided inferencing engines, which range from simple if-then scripting to light-weight inferencing to heavy-weight AI algorithms using pattern matching and unification. Java objects can be created and manipulated using ABLE rules. User-defined functions can be invoked from rules to enable external data to be read and actions to be invoked." Version 2.0.1 adds a new planning engine, updates the Eclipse tools including an enhanced text rule editor and debugger, adds Eclipse-based help, and makes various minor bug fixes.
Ralph Jocham has posted release 0.96 of JCSC (Java Coding Standard Checker), a configurable tool for checking Java source code for adherence to standard conding conventions such as naming conventions, code structure, class size, and line length. According to Jocham, "This release mainly focuses on usability. The Ant task has been improved and simplified. The error handling for wrong usage is improved. The biggest change is the adding of new views on the generated parse data. Now you can look for violations by Category, Severity or by Violation themself. Like, show me all classes that have empty catch block. Also, the explanation of each violation can be seen from the HTML; was only visible in the RulesEditor before." JCSC is published under the GPL. Java 1.3 or later is required.
IBM has posted the first public review draft of Java Specification Request (JSR) 174, Monitoring and Management Specification for the Java Virtual Machine. In essence, this would allow external processes to hook into a virtual machine to watch over thread and memory use. It's not immediately clear to me why this need isn't met by the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI); but one hopes the working group has good reasons for what they're doing. Comments are due by November 13.
Sun has released JavaHelp 2.0, "a full-featured, platform-independent, extensible help system that enables developers and authors to incorporate online help in applets, components, applications, operating systems, and devices. Authors can also use the JavaHelp software to deliver online documentation for the Web and corporate Intranet." 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 Gnu Project has released version 3.3.2 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. 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. At first glance, there do not appear to be any changes or bug fixes in the Java compiler since the previous 3.3.1 release. All the announced bug fixes are in the C/C++/Fortran areas of the compiler.
Apple has released QuickTime 6.4 for Macintosh and Windows. Among other new features, this release supports QuickTime for Java on Java 1.4.1 on both Windows and Mac OS X 10.3. (Previously only Java 1.3 was supported.) Support for Mac OS X 10.2 is not yet available, but is promised for the near future. Support for other platforms (Linux, Solaris, etc.) is not planned.
There's more bad financial news from Sun today. Yesterday they announced a net loss of $286 million, 9 cents a share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2004 that ended September 28. This compares unfavorably with a $111 million loss in the same quarter a year ago.
The first beta of Ant 1.6, the popular open source build tool, has been posted by the Apache Project. "Ant 1.6 adds a lot of new features, most prominently support for XML namespaces as well as a new concept of Ant libraries that makes use of namespaces to avoid name clashes of custom tasks." Java 1.2 or later is required. Java 1.1 is no longer supported.
Nokia and Motorola have submitted Java Specification Request (JSR) 232, Mobile Operational Management to the Java Community Process (JCP). "This Specification will define a component management framework that will allow mobile devices based on the J2ME Connected Device Configuration to evolve and adapt their capabilities by installing new components on demand. These components can be a combination of active elements with no user interaction (services), active elements with user interfaces (applications), and shared libraries (both native and Java). The framework will enforce a predictable lifecycle model for these sharable components that will encompass install, start, stop, update, and uninstall. The framework will also provide for multiple applications to coordinate the use of single-access resources such the device display. In order to ensure a safe environment, these components will be controlled via a mandatory security model based on the Java 2 Platform security model." Comments are due by October 20.
Sun has submitted JSR-231 Java Bindings for OpenGL to the JCP. "This specification will describe the Java bindings to the native 3D graphics library, OpenGL. This will include all core GL calls as well as the GLU library. Functionality available from the wgl/glx/agl platform specific libraries will be abstracted out to create a platform independent way of selecting framebuffer attributes and performing platform specific framebuffer operations. The specification will be made device agnostic to allow for the possibility of subsetting the API for different classes of devices (via future JSR's)." Comments are due by October 20.
debugtools.com has released version 3.3 of JDebugTool, a standalone graphical Java debugger built on top of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA). This release adds some minor new preferences. JDebugTool is $99 (personal)/$199 (corporate) payware.
Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.5.1 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This is mostly a bug fix release, but it also enables fully package qualified names in diagrams.
The Jakarta Apache Project has posted the second release candidate of HTTPClient 2.0. "Although the java.net package provides basic functionality for accessing resources via HTTP, it doesn't provide the full flexibility or functionality needed by many applications. The Jakarta Commons HttpClient component seeks to fill this void by providing an efficient, up-to-date, and feature-rich package implementing the client side of the most recent HTTP standards and recommendations....Designed for extension while providing robust support for the base HTTP protocol, the HttpClient component may be of interest to anyone building HTTP-aware client applications such as web browsers, web service clients, or systems that leverage or extend the HTTP protocol for distributed communication." This version fixes various bugs.
Bodo Tasche has posted JCalendar 0.5, an open source calendar GUI widget for Java that "provides a ComboBox (JCalendarComboBox) for selecting a Date and a simple Panel (JCalendarPanel) for showing and editing a Date." JCalendar is published under a BSD license.
EJBCA 2.1, an open source, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Certificate Authority, has been released. EJBCA can be used standalone or integrated into other J2EE application. It supports multiple levels of certificate authorities, individual enrollment and batch production of certificates, PKCS12 and PEM export, configurable certificate contents. revocation and certificate revocation lists, and more. Version 2.0 adds a Web GUI for administration, speed ups, soft configurable types of signing device, new access control on method invocation, an option to generate JKS or PEM keystores, a CertificatePolicies extension, a return PKCS7 with full path to browsers, new configurable certificate profiles, more alternative names, user profiles for administrators of different groups, improved serial number generation, and a new logging mechanism. As well as fixing bugs, version 2.1 adds support for SCEP, OCSP, and multiple CDPs (whatever those are). EJBCA is published under the LGPL.
IBM's alphaWorks has updated their Enterprise Media Beans, a "rich media framework based on the JSR086 standard proposal for J2EE-compliant applications; media is treated as just another data type. EMB enables applications to integrate rich media data, such as audio, video, or image, into applications based on Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) Entity BeansTM within the J2EE application development model. It allows the embedding of rich media assets into business logic without the worry about client type, server media protocols, media format, or streaming technology. It is a standardized, component-based application model for rich media integration throughout the enterprise -- back-end and infrastructure." The update contains the open source reference implementation and technology compatibility kit code for the proposed final draft of the JSR-86 specification. Windows 2000 is required.
The Eclipse Project has posted the fourth milestone beta of Eclipse 3.0, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It also doubles as a base platform for your own applications, an alternative to the AWT and Swing, and a powerful floor wax and dessert topping. New features in this release are mostly minor. Overall this feels more like a 2.2 than a full version shift. New features since milestone 3 include
- Local and anonymous types now show up in the various Java-specific views by default, along with filters on the views to hide them.
- Introduce Parameter refactoring
- Java compiler option for flagging unqualified instance field accesses
- Java compiler option for flagging unused checked exceptions
- Java compiler option for flagging undocumented empty block
- Java compiler option for flagging finally block which cannot complete normally
- Non-rectangular windows in SWT
- Accessibility API for custom text widgets
- CVS Quick Diff support
- Faster CVS operations
- Workspace auto-builds in background
- Runtime support for dynamically installed plug-ins
- Regular expressions in File search and Find/Replace
- You can now edit files outside the workspace
- Better JavaDoc formatting
The Legion of the Bouncy Castle has released version 1.20 of the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptography API, an open source, clean-room implementation of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). It supports X.509 certificates, PKCS12, S/MIME, CMS, PKCS7, and lots of other juicy acronyms. It also includes its own light-weight crypto API that works in Java 1.0 and later, and does not depend on the JCE. Version 1.20 adds support for OpenPGP. Download it while it's still legal.
Yann Duponchel has released vCard4J, an open source Java toolkit "to manipulate vCard entries in Java. It contains a parser to instantiate these objects from a vCard file. vCard4J relies on XSLTs for the rendering (vCard, xHTML, XML, ...) since the internal model is DOM based. vCard4J also includes a 'type' compiler to add custom vCard types to the library." vCard4J is published under the GPL.
Tagtraum Industries has released GCViewer 1.15, an open source GUI tool that visualizes "the data produced by the Java VM options -verbose:gc and -Xloggc:<file>. This can be very useful when tuning the garbage collection of a particular application by changing generation sizes or setting the initial heap size." GCViewer can also export the data as comma separated values. GCViewer is published under the GPL.
Websina has released BugZero 3.1.2, 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. 3.1.2 adds "Assign to me", "Quick close", and "Delete" links on the Home, query result, and Edit pages.
Eisvogel Flieg has posted a beta of JKMapIME, an open source Unicode input method engine for Java based on the Yudit data. JKMapIME is published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
IBM's alphaWorks has released version 1.1 of the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4, a Java class library for working with MPEG-4 video and audio. Version 1.1 adds a new software development kit for developing MPEG-4 applications and an applet player that supports HTTP "Streaming".
Doug Lea has posted the public review draft specification of JSR 166, Concurrency Utilities, to the Java Community Process (JCP). There's also a public mailing list, CVS repository, and preliminary test release. Kudos to Lea for making the process mcuh more open than is customary within the JCP. According to Lea,
JSR-166 introduces package
java.util.concurrentcontaining utility classes commonly useful in concurrent programming. Like packagejava.util, it includes a few small standardized extensible frameworks, as well as some classes that provide useful functionality and are otherwise tedious or difficult to implement.JSR-166 focusses on breadth, providing critical functionality useful across a wide range of concurrent programming styles and applications, ranging from low-level atomic operations, to customizable locks and synchronization aids, to various concurrent data structures, to high-level execution agents including thread pools. This diversity reflects the range of contexts in which developers of concurrent programs have been found to require or desire support not previously available in J2SE, which also keeping the resulting package small; providing only functionality that it makes sense to standardize.
There's a lot of cool stuff here including thread local variables, thread-wide exception handlers, queues, locks, atomic values and more. This will probably become part of Java 1.5. Comments are due by September 6.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds has posted a an unconventional interview with Neal Stephenson in whihc he doesn't ask the usual questions.
Version 1.1.2 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.
Here are some highlights of new things done since the last development release:
- New packages:
- javax.net
- javax.net.ssl
- Lots of configuration/compile fixes, including: arm-linux, parisc-hpux, parisc-linux, sparc-solaris.
- Improved RMI, JVMPI, java.text and NIO support.
- Improved garbage collector and jit3 memory consumption.
- Further merge with GNU Classpath: Collections, many networking, IO and zip classes.
- Fixes for several bugs in kjc.
- Improved support for building without GNU make.
- Lots of bug fixes, compiler warning fixes, and small improvements.
- Some successes: Tomcat4, eXist, JavaLayer, JOrbis.
Most of the verifier code was checked in, but it is not enabled by default yet, as it requires some further work. The focus of the recent development was largely related to migrating our class libraries over to Classpath. A side-effect has been that a lot of the non-mainstream ports have seen regression, and will need some additional work before they will be functional again.
Michael B. Allen has posted jCIFS 0.7.14,
an SMB client library written in pure Java. It
supports Unicode, named pipes, batching, multiplexing I/O of threaded callers, encrypted authentication, full transactions, domain/workgroup/host/share/file enumeration, NetBIOS sockets and name services, the smb:// URL protocol handler, RAP calls, and more. The API is similar to
java.io.File. This is a bug fix release.
jCIFS is published under the LGPL.
Nokia has released the final version of Java Specification Request (JSR) 179, Location API for J2ME. The purpose of this API is to allow cell phone applets to figure out where you are at any given time. The privacy implications of this are significant, and the expert group does not appear to be addressing them to any significant extent. They simply note that "Some methods in this API are defined to throw a SecurityException if the caller does not have the permissions needed to perform the action. This MUST be enforced by an appropriate security framework in the platform." There's no serious effort here to protect users privacy in any realistic way. They're just solving the technical problem without considering the social implications. They even provide sample code to constantly track the user's movements. What such services should do is absolutely refuse to provide any information about the user's location unless the user speciifcally tells the phone to release such information. Furthermore, that release should be for a single report only. Explicit user permission should be required for each and every transmission of location information.
Frederic Lavigne posted version 1.2.5 of his Skin Look And Feel for Java. This is a bug fix release. 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.
Mark Hale has posted version 0.91 of JSci, a class library containing many useful mathematical and scientific functions such as complex arithmetic. According to Hale, "The main improvement has been to the graph classes. They should behave much more robustly and include new features like ability to set log axes and the ability to incrementally update a graph. This makes it possible to create dynamic/real-time graphs. There have been some changes to the API."
Michael Jakl has posted FProfiler 0.6.1, an open source instrumenting profiler for Java based on BCEL and log4j. It inserts the needed instructions directly into the bytecode of the classes. FProfiler is published under the GPL.
Lorenzo Bettini has released GNU Source-highlight 1.8, a GPL'd tool for reading Java, C/C++, Prolog, Perl, PHP3, Flex, ChangeLog, and Python code and translating them into syntax highlighted HTML and XHTML. Binaries are available for Unix, and it should compile on Windows with the appropriate libraries. Version 1.8 adds JavaScript support and fixes assorted bugs.
Omnicore has released CodeGuide 6.1, a $398 payware integrated development environment for Java. New features include .Java 1.5 support, EMACS keybindings, JUnit integration, and various other minor features and fixes. CodeGuide runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.
IBM's alphaWorks has released a new version of the Documentation Enhancer for Java, a "tool that enhances Javadoc documentation files with semantic information gathered by analyzing the corresponding class files." Features include:
- Sorting by most frequent usage
- Call-graph information for methods
- Effect information for fields
- Reference information for classes
- Executable classes for programs
The big new feature in this release apppears to be the ability to tell which classes are used by which other classes. Other new features include support for more JDKs, improved performance, an Ant Task, and support for classes in the default package.
Sun has restated their results for last fiscal year's fourth quarter. Their $12 million profit has turned into a $1 billion dollar loss. In brief, the accountants decided Sun wasn't going to make enough money anytime soon to take advantage of accumulated tax credits, so they had to take them off their books. :-( For the recently finished first quarter of this fiscal year, Sun announced an expected loss of 7 to 10 cents a share, much worse than generally expected.