The Cafes seems to be off and running. There were a few initial glitches that I have now cleaned up. There's some interesting discussion in the comments fora for On Iterators and Indexes and Overloading Int Considered Harmful. Today's project is to make the staging server work enough like the production server that I can use it for testing and debugging without affecting the production server. Yesterday I got stymied by a slight difference in how the PHP engines were configured. (The staging server didn't have libtidy support that the site relies on heavily.) I had planned to post a backlist article today, but instead I found myself forced to think about spam.
Sleepycat Software has released Berkeley DB Java edition 1.7.0. Berkeley DB JE is an open source, non-relational embedded database written in Java. The data is exposed through "a Java Collections-style interface, as well as a programmatic interface similar to the Berkeley DB API." This release fixes bugs and improves performance. Java 1.4.2 or later is required.
Gaudenz Alder has released JGraph 5.2, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) 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. Version 5.2 fixes some bugs and dual licenses under the Mozilla Public License.
Lately I've noticed that outlets for article sized content are becoming fewer and farther between. I've got lots of things I'd like to write about at a length somewhat longer than a typical Cafe au Lait news item, but much shorter than a full book; so I decided to do something about it. Hence I am announcing The Cafes, a new site for content that falls somewhere in the large territory between a blog post and a book. The initial articles include:
The Cafes will not be updated as regularly as Cafe au Lait; just when I've got something I want to write about. It's going to focus more on How-Tos and technical material, and less on product announcements. The goal is to write more substantive material that will be valuable for a longer period of time. I do have an RSS feed for the site to announce the most recent articles, but my assumption is that most readers will find the site through search engines and links, when looking for information on a specific topic. I will be adding new articles at a rate of about one a day this week, as I've got quite a back log to plow through. Indeed the back log was one of the motivating factors for launching the site.
Also unlike Cafe au Lait/con Leche, the Cafes includes a place for reader comments on each article. I rolled my own comments system on top of PHP and MySQL because I really couldn't find an existing system that did what I wanted it to do. At the same time, since no one's done comments like this before, I pretty much had to code the system from scratch, so it's more than likely there are some bugs flitting around, waiting to be squashed. if you happen on any of the critters, please let me know.
Judging by my server logs, a few of you have found the site already. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I think it's ready to be opened to the public. Check it out, and let me know what you think. Please post any comments you have on the Welcome to the Cafes page. I think you'll like what you see. I'm very excited about The Cafes, and I think it's a going to be a very interesting and productive destination. Happy Java!
The Jakarta Apache Project has posted the first release candidate of Commons Transaction 1.0. "Commons Transaction aims at providing lightweight, standardized, well tested and efficient implementations of utility classes commonly used in transactional Java programming. Initially there are implementations for multi level locks, transactional collections and transactional file access. There may be additional implementations when the common need for them becomes obvious. However, the complete component shall remain compatible to JDK1.2 and should have minimal dependencies."
The Jakarta Apache Project has also posted Tomcat 5.0.30, an open source servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). Tomcat 5.0.30 implements version 2.4 of the Java Servlet API 2.4 and version 2.0 of Java Server Pages. 5.0.30 is a bug fix release. The version numbering is funky, but this is basically a beta release. Presumably 5.0.31 will be the release version.
Enerjy Software has released four new profiliing and static code checking tools:
- Java Code Analyzer 2.2
- Java Memory Profiler 2.5
- Java Performance Profiler 1/5
- Java Thread Profiler 2.5
Each of these is $295 payware.
Eric Lafortune has released ProGuard 3.1, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) "class file shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator. It can detect and remove unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It can then optimize bytecode and remove unused instructions. Finally, it can rename the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. The resulting jars are smaller and harder to reverse-engineer."
IronFlare AB has released OrionServer 2.0.5, a $1500 payware J2EE 1.3 server. It supports the usual J2EE 1.3 features including EJB 2.0, Servlet 2.3, JSP 1.2, Connector 1.0, JTA 1.0.1, JavaMail 1.2, JAF 1.0, JAXP 1.1, JAAS 1.0, JNDI 1.2, JDBC 2.0, and JMS 1.0.2. (How's that for a pack of acronyms?)
The Blackdown Project has released their version of the Java 2 Standard Edition for Linux 1.4.2-01. This includes a software devlopment kit, runtime environment, and Java plug-in for Linux on x86 and Sparc. It's based on Sun's source code for JDK 1.4.2_07. It is not open source.
Nokia has posted an updated maintenance draft review for JSR-212 Server API for Mobile Services: Messaging. The changes are minor but functional. There are three major changes in this review:
- Make it easier to implement the Resource API according to the Java Connector Architecture (JCA) by allowing selected JCA interfaces to be implemented instead of the similar JSR-212 specific interfaces.
- Enable the explicit closing of the connections.
- Specify Segment, UdhElement and MessageId as Serializable.
Comments are due by December 20.
The Jakarta Apache Project has posted the first beta of HTTPClient 3.0. New features in 3.0 include:
- New preference architecture
- Improved exception handling framework
- Granular non-standards configuration and tracking
- Improved HTTP Version configuration and tracking
- Support for streaming entities
- Support for tunneled HTTP proxies via the ProxyClient
- Ability to abort execution of HTTP methods
- Support for closing idle connections
- Support for JDK1.4 connect timeout through reflection
- Support for connection manager shutdown
- Improved authentication framework
- Plug-in mechanism for authentication modules
- Interactive authentication support
- Alternate authentication support
- Cookie specification plug-in mechanism
- 'Ignore cookies' cookie policy
- Improved Netscape cookie support
- Cross-site redirect support
According to the announcement, "Starting with this release the 3.0 API is frozen. We will now focus on creating additional documentation and test cases. All current HttpClient 2.0 users are strongly encouraged to migrate to 3.0. "
Onion Networks has released AntFlow, an open source (Apache license) "hotfolder driven workflow and automation technology based on Apache Ant." According to the announcement, "Using XML, AntFlow associates an automated task, such as data transfer, encryption, or XML processing with a directory on the local system. Whenever a file is copied or written into the hot folder, the associated task is executed and the file is moved to the next hot folder in the pipeline for further processing."
Diomidis Spinellis has released UMLGraph 2.10, an open source (BSD license) tool for declaratively specifying UML diagrams. UMLGraph uses text files that look vaguely like source code to specify how UML class and sequence diagrams are drawn. A doclet converts this into a Graphviz diagram that can be easily converted to Postscript, GIF, SVG, JPEG, etc. This is a bug fix release.
Siemens and Nokia have posted an early draft review of Java Specification Request 228, Information Module Profile - Next Generation (IMP-NG) to the Java Community Process (JCP). Comments are due by December 2.
Sun has posted an early draft review of JSR 233, J2EE Mobile Device Management and Monitoring Specification to the JCP. Comments are due by December 3.
Nokia has submitted JSR 258, Mobile User Interface Customization API to the JCP. According to the JSR,
The overall goal is the specification of an API that allows the customization of the look and feel of the user interface components in a mobile device or platform. This can be achieved by allowing the API to access the customization properties of user interface (i.e. the themes), providing a mechanism to achieve a uniform customized look and feel in the user interface components, regardless of their underlying implementation mechanism.
The API should have the following functionality:
- Querying the customization properties of user interface themes of a mobile device or platform.
- Modifying the customization properties of user interface themes of a mobile device or platform.
The initial requirements for the API are:
- - Independence of specific user interface toolkits. The API should work with any graphical user interface toolkit, including (but not limited to) the LCDUI of MIDP, AGUI of JSR 209 or AWT of PBP/PP.
- Providing an open framework for access to customization properties, without being fixed to any specific named collection of customization properties.
Access to a collection of customization properties is provided through a vocabulary. This vocabulary may be specific to a device or a platform. The customization API will try to identify a common vocabulary for the properties. However, the API should be an open and flexible framework for accessing any device-specific or platform-specific properties. The properties are not limited to UI APIs, but may include also application platform properties like application icons, tones etc.
The specification enables implementations where the customization uniformly affects all user interface elements of applications (both native and Java) in the device or platform, thereby achieving a unified user experience across the device.
The JSR expert group will study whether there is a need to have application-specific customization capabilities, or the need to extend the customization capabilities to functional elements such as menu extensions and browser bookmarks.
This JSR will specify the UI customization API as an Optional Package API, and does not assume any specific application model or UI toolkit. The Optional Package can be used by any J2ME application using any supported application model, running on any J2ME Profile.
The API can be utilized in the creation of a customized look and feel for custom UI components, but it does not define any APIs for creating those custom components. The custom components are created using the facilities available in existing UI toolkits.
The expert group will also study whether there is a need to specify an over-the-air (OTA) transmission/serialization format for the customization property / UI theme data.
Websina has released BugZero 3.9.6, a $1299 payware (+$300 for maintenance) 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. 3.9.6 fixes bugs.
Oliver Burn has released Checkstyle 3.5, a lint-like tool that checks Java code for adherence to various coding standards. Besides bug fixes new features in 3.5 include:
- maxErrors and maxWarnings attributes in Ant task
- Check for a required regular expression
- Check for NCSS metric
- Check for multiple string literals
- Check for a modified control variable in a for loop
- Filter that suppresses audit events according to source file comments
- French message translations
- DataAbstractionCoupling reports coupling classes
- FinalLocalVariable ignores parameters of interface methods and abstract methods
As is all too comon for these sorts of tools. the documentation, though better than average, was still actively misleading, and the product did not work if you followed the instructions. (One file was not in the directory the examples said it was in.) Still the problem wasn't too hard to debug, and after I corrected this, checkstyle generated almost 30,000 error messages when I ran it across the XOM code base. A few of these were false positives. Most of them were either "Line has trailing spaces" or "File does not end with a newline". These are very minor points, and certainly not something I'm going to fix at the cost of mucking up my source repository. Some of the issues are flat-out wrong; in particular the complaints about "Unused @throws tag for 'IllegalDataException'" and other runtime exceptions. checkstyle also seemed to believe that I should decalre all my method arguments final, a rather pointless exercise IMO, given that Java passes all arguments by value. It also seems to want me to put JavaDoc comments on all my private methods and fields. There were a lot of other issues like this. If it found any real problems, I lost them in the sea of false positives. Checkstyle is published under the LGPL.
ej-technologies has released Install4j 3.1.1, a $698 payware cross platform tool for building native installers and application launchers for Java applications. New features in 3.1 include :
- Separation of media file types into "installers" and "archives"
- New archive types: Windows archive, Mac OS X single bundle archive, Mac OS X folder archive
- Improved update awareness
- Ability to create "add-on" installers to distribute patches and plugins
- Smaller JRE 1.5 bundles by supporting the Network Transfer Format for Java Archives
3.1.1 is a bug fix release.
ej-technologies has also released version 3.0 of exe4j, a $99 payware tool for integrating Java programs into Windows with your own process name, task-bar grouping, native splash screens, and so forth. New features in 3.0 include:
- New API for notification of multiple startups in single instance mode
- Creation of redirection files on demand
- Can redirect stderr and stdout to the same file
- The started process of an exe4j executable remains the same during the entire execution
- Improved startup error notification
- Can use environment variables in classpath entries
- Support for UNC path names
The results are in the 2004 Java Community Process elections. New members are Google and JBoss for two year terms, and Intel for a one year term. Hani Suleiman came in fourth. Intel and Orange France SA were elected to the J2ME committee, and will serve for two years.
Sun's posted the first snapshot release of Mustang, a.k.a Java 1.6, a.k.a Java 2 6.0, a.k.a Java 6, a.k.a Java Who The Fuck Knows What They'll Call This? Version numbering aside, this is actually fairly cool. This is basically an early development release that includes source code. It's currently published only under the Java Research License. It's available on the usual Sun-supported platforms: Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
Randy Giedyrcz let me know that BookPool is selling the third edition of Java Network Programming for $22.75, a 43% discount, and quite a bit cheaper than Amazon. This is the lowest price I've seen yet.
Xan Gregg took up my challenge to port the prime number finding code to Java. According to Gregg:
I ported these to Java this week-end. Results are below for various machines. Java holds up pretty well and even finds an index-out-of-bounds error in the C code. As a benchmark, these programs test 64-bit arithmetic, i/o, array access, and general program flow.
# AthC G5CWC G5Java P4Java Test 1. 83.8 237.0 113.5 176.6 brute force to 10,000,000 2. 18.2 50.5 15.1 32.8 linked list 3. 16.6 45.9 14.1 31.0 #2, skipping multiples of 2 4. 16.4 45.3 14.0 30.4 #2, skipping multiples of 2, 3, 5 5. 2.3 2.2 3.4 3.7 sieve with bytes 6. 4.5 11.7 5.0 8.4 sieve with bits and division 7. 2.2 1.9 2.8 3.4 sieve with bits and bit shift 8a. 23.0 23.9 25.1 33.1 #7 to 100,000,000 8b. 0.1 * 0.4 0.1 write 1,000,000 8c. 11.8 24.8 13.5 18.5 paged search to 100,000,000 8d. 249.6 283.0 259.0 335.6 #7 to 1,000,000,000 8e. 1.9 * 4.0 4.0 write 10,000,000 8f. 225.9 291.4 186.4 255.0 paged search to 1,000,000,000
- Values are times in seconds.
- AthC is the Athlon 2400XP with 1.5GB RAM from the article
- G5CWC is a Mac G5 2GHz with 1GB using CodeWarrior
- G5Java is a Mac G5 2GHz with 1GB using IDEA 4 (JDK 1.4)
- P4Java is a 1.8 GHz P4 with 512 MB using IDEA 4 (JDK 1.4)
- * 8b and 8e not run on G5-CWC -- just used from output from java run
I couldn't get CodeWarrior to use G5 64-bit instructions -- I wonder if the G5 JVM was taking advantage of them. In theory, that would be an advantage for Java since C compilers usually produce code that will run on any version of the processor but the JIT can tune the code it produces to the particular processor version it's running on.
The author doesn't say why 8a is often slower than 8b+8c, even though the former is memory-only. I think it's because the 8c passes start with the under 1,000,000 primes in a regular array instead of scattered throughout a bit array. Finding the next prime for testing is just a matter of incrementing the index into the array instead of scanning through bits in the bit array.
I've uploaded Gregg's source code if anyone feels like seeing if they can improve on these numbers. On the only same hardware comparison in these tests, Java executes about twice as fast as C, but that may just reflect the weakness of the C compiler used. It's also possible the overhead of running in an IDE hurt the numbers all around.
For the last couple of days I've been programming in the weakly typed language PHP. For the last few years I've been hearing quite a few people, most notably Bruce Eckel and James Robertson, extol the virtues of weakly typed languages.
So far I'm not convinced. I've repeatedly found myself running up against bugs that simply would not have been possible in Java, or that would have been caught almost immediately by the compiler, misspelled variable names for example.
I just got hit by another one. I was writing $myarray[index] instead of $myarray[$index]. There goes another ten minutes of debugging that I would not have had to do in Java.
Ten minutes here, ten minutes there; the bugs add up. Collectively these bugs that could have been prevented by strong typing have cost me hours of productivity. Admittedly, none of them have made it into production yet; but at least two of them were extremely hard to track down. Eckel is primarily advocating Python and Robertson Smalltalk, so perhaps there are other language issues besides simply weak typing that explain the problems I'm having. On the other hand I did start out trying to implement this project in Zope+Plone+Python, and gave up in frustration. Why am I using PHP instead of Java, then? Well that's a story for another day; although that story has been mostly written and will be told soon.
Amazon has dropped their price on the third edition of Java Network Programming to $26.37, a 34% discount. This is the lowest price I've seen from a major bookstore, though some of the Amazon marketplace sellers have it even lower.
The Gnu Project has released version 0.12 of
GNU Classpath, an incomplete
free implementation of the
core Java class libraries. This release fills in numerous holes in support across the core libraries including
X.509 certificate path checking, signed JAR files, java.awt.color, java.beans 1.4 updates. It also improves
the build process, AWT focus management, font support, AWT Choice menus,
HTTP POST, and regular expressions. Since this is a clean room project, it doens't always line up exactly with any particular Java version. This release achieves a complete implementation of the Java 1.0 API for the first time, aside from a few places where the 1.0 and 1.4 APIs are incompatible. However, lots of classes and methods added from 1.1 through 1.4 are included as well.
GNU Classpath is published under the GPL with library exception.
Teodor Danciu's posted version 0.6.2 of JasperReports, an open source Java library for generating reports from XML templates and customizable data sources (including JDBC). The output can be displayed on the screen, printed, or written to XML or PDF files. Version 0.6.2 supports internationalization.
Websina has released BugZero 3.9.5, a $1299 payware (+$300 for maintenance) 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. 3.9.5 requires double confirmation for deleting users and fixes bugs.
Timothy Wall has posted version 0.13.1 of the Abbot GUI testing framework has been released. This release allows arbitrary Java code in scripts, supports non-US keymaps/keyboard layouts, extends AWT support, and fixes bugs. Abbot is published under the LGPL.
Sun's released a pure Java MP3 playing plugin for JavaSound and the Java Media Framework. I haven't tried it yet myself, but the initial reports are not promising. It appears to have some major installation issues.
The Apache Project has posted the third milestone release of Geronimo, their open source J2EE application server. "The aim of the project is to produce a large and healthy community of J2EE developers tasked with the development of an open source, certified J2EE server, that is ASF licensed and passes Sun's TCK reusing the best ASF/BSD licensed code available today and adding new code to complete the J2EE stack." According to the release notes, significant changes since the second milestone release are:
- CMP Entity beans are now supported. However, there are still significant limitations (no EJB QL support). This is one of the last outstanding core J2EE features.
- Geronimo security realms have been integrated with the J2EE containers, so J2EE container-managed authentication works.
- The web container now supports HTTPS with configurable SSL certificates, etc.
- The transaction system is more robust, with bug fixes, transaction log support, etc.
- An application client container is now included with Geronimo
- Configuration changes to core Geronimo services and running applications are persisted, though we still lack a user-friendly interface for making such changes.
- Manifest Class-Path entries in J2EE application modules are supported.
- JDBC database pools and JMS connection factories, topics, and queues are now fully supported "out of the box".
- When deploying a J2EE connector, multiple instances of the same resource adapter can be declared in the same deployment plan.
- The command-line deployment tool supports authentication and hot deployment to a running server.
- JAX-RPC and SAAJ features are available to applications acting as Web Services clients (though Web Services server features are not yet available)
Also according to the release notes, significant missing features currently include:
- Full EJB CMP support with EJB QL
- Message-Driven Beans support for JMS (currently present but buggy in comparison to non-JMS message sources)
- A good management tool, capable of reconfiguring the core Geronimo services (such as setting a different default transaction timeout, changing default security realm, changing web container listen port, etc.)
- A complete JSR-77 implementation, including the Management EJB
- A complete JSR-88 configuration and deployment tool
- JSR-88 support for Geronimo deployment plan configuration
- Web Services server features and required J2EE features
- Fully integrate Tomcat as an alternative to Jetty as the web container
- Full functionality on non-Sun JVMs
- Support for CORBA interoperability and distribution
- Deployment tools should work from remote machines
- Application client container should work from remote machines
- Support for general JDBC XA drivers, and product-specific JDBC enhancements
- Better features for migrating application and service configurations between different Geronimo servers
- Ant tasks for common tasks (deployment, etc.)
Java 1.4 or later is required.
YourKit, LLC has released the YourKit Java Profiler 3.1.1, a 295€ payware tool for detecting memory leaks and memory consumption bottlenecks. It features Automation of memory leak detection, an object heap browser, JUnit integration, IntelliJ IDEA, Borland JBuilder integration. Version 3.1.1 improves CPU sampling accuracy. The profiler runs on Windows or Linux.
The Apache Jakarta Commons Project has posted the second release candidate of Commons Math 1.0, an open source library providing many mathematical functions for statistics, random data generation,
linear algebra, root finding,
interpolation,
erf, gamma and beta functions,
arrays, factorials,
complex numbers, distributions, matrices, and solving linear systems.
It looks like it covers most practical math you might encounter at roughly the level of a typical undergraduate course in
mathematical methods for physics. Based on spot checks of the Complex class and the factorial function, this looks like pretty solid work. I don't see any of the usual mistakes I'm used to seeing in such classes. For instance, the MathUtils.factorial() method throws an
ArithMeticException if the result overflows the bounds of a long.
Commons Math is published under the Apache 2.0 license.
Werner Randelshofer has released the Quaqua Look and Feel 2.4, "an extension for Apple's implementation of the Aqua Look for Swing. Quaqua aims at fixing inconsistencies between user interface elements implemented in Swing and those of native Mac OS X applications. To achieve this, Quaqua selectively replaces UI elements of Apples Aqua Look And Feel with elements of its own." Quaqua is dual licensed under the BSD license model and the LGPL. Java 1.3 or later and Mac OS X 10.2 or later are required. Changes since 2.0 are fairly minor user interface improvements and bug fixes.
In my continuing efforts
to make XML dead-bang easy to manipulate with Java,
I've posted beta 7 of XOM, my dual streaming/tree API for processing XML with Java. This release fixes a few bugs and approximately doubles the performance of a few common operations including
getValue(), toXML(), DOM and SAX conversion, canonicalization, and XSL transformation.
This is the first release candidate. There are still a few open issues with regard to error handling in XInclude that require clarification from the XInclude working group. If they decide that how XOM currently behaves is correct, then XOM 1.0 is essentially complete. If they decide to require different behavior, a few changes may yet need to be made.
The Apache Software Foundation has released Maven 1.0.1, an open source "Java project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object model (POM) in that all the artifacts produced by Maven are a result of consulting a well defined model for your project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source cross-references are all controlled by your POM.... Maven has many goals, but in a nutshell Maven aims to make the developer's life easier by providing a well defined project structure, well defined development processes to follow, and a coherent body of documentation that keeps your developers and clients apprised of what's happening with your project." 1.0.1 appears to be a bug fix release.
The NetBeans Project has posted the third alpha release of a profiler based on Sun Labs' JFluid. It can profile memory and CPU usage. New features in this release include NetBeans 4.0 support and various usability enhancements and bug fixes.
Websina has released BugZero 3.9.4, a $1299 payware (+$300 for maintenance) 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. 3.9.4 is a bug fix release.
Anyone want to port these prime number finding algorithms to Java? I have a funny feeling the results might be surprising.
The Gnu Project has released version 3.4.3 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. 3.4.3 is a bug fix release, mostly focusing on C++ isssues but it does fix one "GCJ segmentation fault while compiling GL4Java .class files."
Etienne Gagnon has released version 1.1.7 of SableVM, a Java bytecode interpreter (that is, a virtual machine) written in portable C. "SableVM requires an ANSI/ISO C compiler (but preferably GCC) and a POSIX platform. It requires a strong memory model (sequential consistency) on multiprocessor systems." SableVM is available for GNU/Linux. Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD. Version 1.1.7 allows users to add to the bootclasspath, improves error messages for bootstrap problems, adds a new generational garbage collector and fixes a number of bugs. SableVM is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
2004 is becoming the year of third editions, as I am now happy to announce my third third edition this year, Java Network Programming. The third edition retains almost everything that made the last two editions bestsellers (I did cut one chapter on applets that wasn't hugely relevant in 2004) and adds a lot of material on new features introduced in Java 1.4 and 1.5 including:
- Non-blocking I/O and the java.nio package
- Cookies
- URL Caches
- Stubless RMI
- IPv6
- Proxies
- The NetworkInterface class
- The SocketAddress class
Perhaps the most significant addition to the third edition is the animal on the cover. Henceforth, Java Network Programming will be known as "The Otter Book":
The third edition is available now from Amazon, Powell's, and and Barnes & Noble. Note that there's a bug in Amazon's database: if you search for "Elliotte Harold" or "Java Network Programming", the second edition still comes up. However, if you follow the links here you'll go straight to the third edition. You can also read it online as part of a Safari subscription. I've added more than a few pages and a lot of content to this edition, but the price remains the same, $39.95. Amazon is currently showing it at 32% off, $27.17, which is the lowest price I've seen. Order now. Amazon never orders enough copies of my new books, and typically sells out of their initial stock very soon after I announce a book here, sometimes within the first hour or two. If they've sold out, don't worry. O'Reilly will get them some more very quickly, certainly sooner than the 1-2 weeks they generally promise. Check it out!
The Eclipse Project has posted the third milestone of Eclipse 3.1, 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. The main new features in 3.1 are Ant 1.6.2, quick fixes for serial version IDs, and some (still incomplete) support for Java 1.5. New features in this milestone include:
- Flagging of references to classes in the sun and com.sun packages
- New quick assists include convert between ? operator and if-else statement, invert a conditional expression, introduce a new local variable after an
instanceofcheck, and break out a substring literal, (though why anyone would need to do that, or need an assist if they dud, I can't imagine.) - Flagging of @see and @link tags that reference deprecated and inaccessible elements
- More Java 5 features including enumerations, static imports, generics, and varargs
- New refactorings including Convert Anonymous Class to Nested and move instance method,
- The locks owned by a thread as well as the lock a thread is waiting for can both be displayed inline in the Debug view.
- When you linger over a key for an externalized string in the Java editor, the associated externalized value is shown in a hover.
- Copy and paste a stack trace into the Java Stack Trace Console and use hyperlinks to navigate the trace.
- The debugger can display the
toString()-computed value of a variable can be displayed inline in the Variables view tree, as well as in the details area. - Breakpoint groups support nested groups and prevent the loss of user defined groups when the group settings are changed in the Breakpoints view.
- CTRL+Z (Windows) and CTRL+D (Linux) are recognized as EOF in the console.
- The console character encoding can be configured on a per-launch basis.
- The runtime supports a new plug-in format that houses all of the plug-in's files - code, resources, plug-in manifest - in a single JAR file, rather than in a directory.
- The PDE can launch an Eclipse application at development time with the same custom configuration file (config.ini) you plan to deploy with your application.
- Hyperlink navigation in ant editor
- In the Ant editor, place your the on the name of an Ant task, type, etc. and press SHIFT+F2 to open a browser on the relevant page in the Ant manual. (Yeah, like anyone can remember that. It's been known for at least 20 years that menus outperform keyboard shortcuts.)
- It is now possible to create resources in Eclipse with names containing colon (':') and backslash ('\') characters on Linux.
- SWT's support for bidirectional languages has been extended up into JFace and the workbench.
- The JFace TableViewer widget now supports the SWT.VIRTUAL flag, which only creates table items as they are needed to reduce the number of operating system resources required for long tables.
The Eclipse Project has released AspectJ 1.2.1. AspectJ is a derivative of Java that allows programmers to write code that applies across multiple classes. The AspectJ compiler requires Java 1.3 but can generate code for Java 1.1 and later. According to the announcement, "AspectJ 1.2.1 contains an updated version of the JDT Java compiler, a number of tools improvements, runtime performance optimisations, the ability to split declare error/warning messages across several lines using the '+' operator, and numerous bug fixes."
IBM's alphaWorks has released HeapAnalyzer, a tool for locating possible memory leaks through "heuristic search engine and analysis of the Java heap dump in Java applications. Java heap areas define objects, arrays, and classes. When the Garbage Collector allocates areas of storage in the heap, an object continues to be live while a reference to it exists somewhere in the active state of the JVM; therefore the object is reachable. When an object ceases to be referenced from the active state, it becomes garbage and can be reclaimed for reuse. When this reclamation occurs, the Garbage Collector must process a possible finalizer and also ensure that any internal JVM resources that are associated with the object are returned to the pool of such resources. Java heap dumps are snap shots of Java heaps at specific times."
Cenqua has released Clover 1.3.2, a $250 payware unit test coverage tool. This is a bug fix release.
Clover modifies the source code to enable it to follow which statements are executed when, and keeps a running count of how many times each statement is executed during the test suite. Any statement that executes zero times is not being tested. Unlike Jester, Clover
only tests whether the tests execute each statement and follow each branch. (It occasionally misses branches on the edges of >= or <=.)
It does not test whether the tests correctly detect bugs. On the other hand, it runs orders of magnitude faster than a tool like Jester does. It's easy to use Clover several times a day. Indeed you can use it after each change to the test suite. By contrast, a Jester run can take several days to complete.
Ideally you'd want to use both a tool like Jester and a tool like Clover since they do different things.
Clover has been a major help in developing XOM. It has located numerous bugs in XOM over the last year, and is largely responsible for the completeness of XOM's test suite. Clover has also helped to optimize XOM for both speed and size by finding dead, unreachable code I could cut out. As usual, I tested the
new release on the current XOM code base.
This run didn't find anything I didn't already know about, but it did inspire me to write tests for a few uncovered areas, mostly code that
worked around bugs or used special features of particular XML parsers. Wouldn't you know it? There was a major bug hiding in one place in the untested code (now fixed).
At this point XOM achieves over 90% test coverage, and most of the things that aren't tested are unreachable code like catch blocks for exceptions that won't be thrown or extra case statements included just to allow the switch statement to be compiled with the tableswitch instruction. Still, they're a few untested lines of code I think I could cover, though it's getting harder. This latest batch of tests required implementing my own pseudo-parser that could call methods the normal SAX parser wouldn't call. Expanding the test coverage further might require implementing my own ClassLoader to force other bugs to surface. These cases mostly reflect workarounds for known bugs in particular libraries, platforms, and virtual machines that don't normally appear with other libraries, platforms, and virtual machines.
Clover is one of the few tools I can recommend unconditionally, and would certainly pay for if Cenqua hadn't given me a free copy. (That's not personal, by the way. They'll happily provide free copies to all open source projects.) Clover integrates with Ant, NetBeans, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA. new in this release is support for Oracle JDeveloper 10g. Clover can generate test coverage reports in XML, HTML, PDF, or via a Swing Viewer. Java 1.2 or later is required.
R. Rawson-Tetley has posted SwingWT 0.85,
an open source, "100% pure Java library which very closely resembles the interface of Swing. The difference is that instead of using the Swing library, it drives native peer widgets from SWT" (the Eclipse GUI toolkit).
With this library, Java/Swing applications can be compiled natively under Linux using gcj. It also allows Swing apps to use native widgets.
This release adds support for SWT 3.0.1, StyledDocument/JEditorPane, pluggable editor panes,
and a classloader that swaps Swing for SwingWT on the fly (neat hack!).
SwingWT is dual licensed under the Common Public License
and the LGPL.
YourKit, LLC has released the YourKit Java Profiler 3.1, a 295€ payware tool for detecting memory leaks and memory consumption bottlenecks. It features Automation of memory leak detection, an object heap browser, JUnit integration, IntelliJ IDEA, Borland JBuilder integration. Version 3.1 adds support for Solaris and Eclipse 3.1M2 and fixes a few bugs. Besides Solaris, the profiler also runs on Windows or Linux. Upgrades from 3.0 are free.
Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.61 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This release moves from DocBook 4.2 to DocBook 4.3, upgrades docbook-xsl to version 1.66, and fixes some bugs.
I've updated my pages about Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle (actually just QuickSilver and The Confusion) with the latest reader comments. I've also started a new page about The System of the World, for anyone who's finished all four books. Warning: there are big spoilers on all three pages. Do not read these until you've finished the respective books.
Nokia has posted the public review draft specification of
Java Specification Request 238, Mobile Internationalization API,
to the Java Community Process. This includes one package, javax.microedition.global.Formatter, with five classes:
Formatter,
ResourceException,
ResourceManager,
StringComparator, and
UnsupportedLocaleException. Basically, this seems to be a
simplified version of some of java.text.
Comments are due by December 6.