The Java Apache Project has released the Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server (JAMES) 2.3.1. It's a 100% pure Java Mail Server which introduces Mailets. The idea is to do for email what servlets do for the Web. You can use maillets to automatically process and reply to email messages using the full power of Java. 2.3.1 is mostly a bug fix release. James is published under the Apache 2.0 license.
The GNU Project has released version 0.95 of GNU Classpath, an incomplete free implementation of the core Java class libraries. "This release switches fully towards the 1.5 generics work that we previously released separately as classpath-generics. All this work is now fully integrated in the main release and various runtimes (gcj, cacao, jamvm, ikvm, etc) have been extended to take advantage of the new generics, annotations and enumeration support in the core library. From now on we intend to no longer release both a non-generics and a generics version. But if there is demand we might consider resurrecting the non-generics 1.4 branch with selected bug-fixes (depending on having a branch maintainer). Work is on the way to also add the new 1.6 additions, a start for selected packages has been made in this release." GNU Classpath is published under the GPL with library exception.
ej-technologies GmbH has released version 5.0 of
JProfiler,
a $698 payware profiler
based on the Java virtual machine profiling interface (JVMPI
that can report on CPU usage, memory size, threads, and "VM telemetry"
(whatever that is).
New features in this release include:
- Trigger and action system
- HPROF memory snapshots
- Call tracer view
- New VM telemetries
Upgrades from previous versions are $179.
Kohsuke Kawaguchi has released Mock JavaMail. According to Kawaguchi, "Testing JavaMail applications is more difficult than necessary, because it involves in a lot of set up outside the test program. Doing this correctly in a portable way so that anyone in your team can run the test is almost impossible. Mock JavaMail comes to rescue. This project takes advantage of pluggability in JavaMail, so that you can send/receive e-mails against the temporary in-memory 'mailbox'."
Nathan Funk has released JEP 2.4.1. a free-as-in-speech (GPL) Java library for parsing and evaluating mathematical expressions. Version 2.4.1 adds the rounding functions.
Version 3.4.2 of EJBCA, 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. This release fixes bugs.. EJBCA is published under the LGPL.
If you're planning to come to my talk this coming Monday for the New York Java Study Groups on "Java 7 and Beyond" please RSVP to rsvp@nycjava.net and plan on arriving by 6:30. Everyone is welcome, but space is limited.
Charles Oliver Nutter, Thomas Enebo, and Ola Bini have released JRuby 0.9.9, a "1.8.5 compatible Ruby interpreter written in 100% pure Java." It also supports the Bean Scripting Framework. "This release has largely been a stabilization release where we have spent more focus on Ruby compatibility."
JRuby is distributed under three licenses CPL, GPL, LGPL. That's just way too confusing. There's zero-need to dual license under both the LGPL and GPL since the LGPL explicitly allows code to be forked into a pure GPL product.
The Apache Project has released Jackrabbit 1.3, an open source implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR) specified in Java Specification Request 170.
Apache Jackrabbit is a fully conforming implementation of the Content Repository for Java Technology API (JCR). A content repository is a hierarchical content store with support for structured and unstructured content, full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Typical applications that use content repositories include content management, document management, and records management systems.
Apache Jackrabbit 1.3 is an incremental feature release. The most notable changes in this release are support for query result highlighting, performance improvements thanks to a new bundle persistence manager, and a new classloader component for loading Java classes from a content repository. Many smaller improvements and bug fixes are also included.
Sun has withdrawn JSR-313, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification , from the Java Community Process. It's not immediately clear why. presumably they'll resubmit something in the future.
JetBrains has released TeamCity 2.0, a semi-IDE independent continuous integration server. TeamCity manages builds and can be configured not to check in code unless tests pass. (This is actually a quite bad idea, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere. Refusing to commit failing tests is simple denial. Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward fixing it.) Version 2.0 adds support for Eclipse and Visual Studio. It also adds a "completely redesigned user interface for accessing TeamCity features within IntelliJ IDEA and improved code quality maintenance features." TeamCity is $399 payware.
Next Monday, April 30, I will be joining the NYC Java Study Groups to talk about Java 7 and Beyond:
2007 will go down in history as the year Sun Microsystems gave up the reins of the Java platform, releasing it under an open source license to the Java developer community. In this talk Java developer Elliotte Rusty Harold predicts new directions for the Java platform, in everything from scripting to bug fixing to new syntax. We'll talk about various proposals for both the language and libraries including closures, type inference, I/O, and more.
The meeting takes place at 6:30 P.M. at the New Yorker Hotel, 34th and 8th Ave, Room 550. Everyone is welcome.
Speaking of user groups, I've finished the first draft of my next book and have a little down time, so if you've been wanting to hear me, now's the time to ask. Besides "Java 7 and Beyond", I'm also interested in talking about "Refactoring HTML", "XML Processing in PHP", XForms, Web Forms 2.0, and HTML 5 (and you can usually talk me into other subjects as well.) I'm based in New York, and I'll be in San Francisco for JavaOne the second week of May. I'll be in Chicago in July and Boston at least once in the Fall. Drop me a line if you're interested.
Enterprise Distributed Technologies has released edtFTPj/Pro 1.5.0, a $299 payware FTP library for Java that supports FTP over SSL. Version 1.5.0 adds a scripting language.
jPOS 1.6 has been released.
jPOS is an "ISO-8583 library/framework that can be used to implement financial interchanges, protocol converters, payment gateways, credit card verification clients and servers (merchant/issuer/acquirer)."
This release is mostly bug fixes, speed ups, and build improvements.
The Apache Software Foundation has released of Maven 2.0.6, an open source build tool for Java that's more declarative and less procedural than Ant. This is mostly a bug fix release.
The Big Faceless Organization has released the Big Faceless PDF Library 2.7.8, a $700 payware (more if you want support) Java class library for creating PDF documents. The $1300 Extended Edition adds the AcroForms support, digital signatures, and the ability to import and edit and existing PDF documents. This release adds support for JBIG2 compression.
I've posted a summary of the responses I received to last month's query about JavaOne/Moscone center hotels on The Cafes. If you have anything to add, please leave a comment.
Kirill Grouchnikov has released the Substance Look-and-Feel 3.3. This release adds support for resolution independent themes for high-DPI displays. (Think 120, 144, 200 dots-per-inch or higher.) This is a very good idea, that designers need to pay a lot more attention to going forward. I've been using a 110 dpi monitor since 1999, some laptops are already at 120 dpi, and medical displays are now crossing 200 dpi. A simple linear conversion from inches to pixels is no longer an acceptable compromise. (Across platforms, it never really was because Macs used 72 dpi and Windows 96 dpi.)
On the down side, this release adds four tasteless new themes: Business Blue Steel, Business Black Steel, Raven Graphite and Raven Graphite Glass. One more time: multiple, inconsistent look-and-feels are a bug, not a feature.
Java 5 or later is required. Substance is published under a BSD license.
Tonight, Tuesday, April 17, is the seventh iteration of Extreme Tuesday New York. This will be held at D.B.A., 41 1st Ave, between 2nd and 3rd streets, starting at 6:30. I have another meeting at that time so I'll probably miss this one.
Sun has posted an early access release of the Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5.1 for CLDC. This release adds Linux support.
Sun has also released versions of the Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5.1 localized in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
It's a little annoying having to pick all the JavaOne sessions in advance. Nonetheless I think I've got it down now. Tentatively, here are the sessions I'm planning to attend. I don't think the schedule builder included key notes, and I may have to abandon some of the later BoFs. Some of these were not easy choices, and I'm definitely missing more than I'll get to see.
It's a little disturbing that aside from the X in AJAX, I didn't see one single session that mentioned XML. Had I known that I was going a little earlier, I might have submitted some talks on XOM and/or Human Factors in API Design. (I did spot one interesting talk on the latter subject though.)
As is, I'll be attending as press. I'll be live reporting here as time permits, and doing a full show wrap-up on developerWorks. If anyone has something interesting to talk about or demo, send me e-mail before the show. As you can see, I don't have a lot of free time; but I should be able to squeeze people in somewhere. Lunch and dinner look like the best slots. I will also be around on Monday for NetBeans/Community Day.
Sun has posted the early draft review of early draft review of Java Specification Request 203, More New I/O APIs for the Java Platform. Proposed features include:
- Buffer classes capable of containing more than Integer.MAX_VALUE elements
- A revised filesystem API supporting copy and move methods, as well as file attributes.
- Asynchronous channels
- Multicast NIO
I'm working through it now. There are lots of details I'd adjust, but overall the direction feels about right. Comments are due by May 27.
On reviewing this, I think I'm struck by a fundamental flaw in the JCP for the first time. Sun is still mired in a 20th century, waterfall, big bang approach to development. There are at least three, probably more, different things going on in this JSR that could certainly be separated and developed independently.
However that would require three separate efforts and three JSRs, and the whole JCP process is too heavyweight for something as simple as "add copy and move methods to the File class". If it isn't an all-singing, all-dancing, asynchronous, extravaganza with closures and annotations galore, it's just not worth filing the JSR for.
Rather than a slow evolution and accumulation of features, each one being rolled out when it's ready, there's a massive rush to push everything into each roughly biennial release of the JDK. Some simple features are held back long after they could have been released while others are pushed out well before they're ready. This is partially a result of the idea that everything has to be in the core library: data structures, database access, XML parsing, cryptography, sockets, and a dozen other things. JDK development is based on a fundamentally unagile, unmodular model.
Perhaps this is fundamental to platforms. Still I wonder if there's a better way (and perhaps the open sourcing of the JDK might enable it). What's the real core of Java? The pieces you can't do without? java.lang, a few pieces of java.io and java.util Could we cut the language and library down to this, then add pieces only as necessary for each application?
I think the key to making this work would be one more language feature. We'd need to get serious about package management and versioning. We'd need a standard way to identify the required versions of each library, or perhaps each class. Then classes would need to be able to specify the minimum version of the libraries they require. Some sort of centralized system or user repository would hold different versions of various libraries. Maven already comes very close to this, and JSR-277 may go further.
JetBrains has posted the first milestone beta of IntelliJ IDEA 7.0. "IntelliJ IDEA 7 Milestone 1 introduces multiple new features and improvements in Java EE support, including Spring and Hibernate, code analysis, extended version control support, including Rational ClearCase integration, enhanced debugging, code search, usability and performance." IDEA is $499 payware.
Oracle has released Berkeley DB Java Edition 3.2.23. This 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." "A potential, although highly unlikely, data corruption bug has been fixed in this release."
Berkeley DB Java Edition is published under a custom, viral license that is compatible with most major open source licenses. The license is a little confusing, though. It's not clear to me whether you have to release the source code to a Java program that calls Berkeley DB JE or just the source code to Java. The FAQ says, "The Berkeley DB open source license requires that software that uses Berkeley DB be freely redistributable. In the case of Perl or Python, that software is Perl or Python, and not your scripts. Any scripts you write are your property, including scripts that make use of Berkeley DB. None of the Perl, Python or Berkeley DB licenses place any restrictions on what you may do with them." That seems to indicate that it's just Java's source you have to release, which would be possible post-GPL and impossible pre-GPL, even for another open source project. Custom licenses are a pain. You can of course buy a payware license, but in classic Oracle fashion, they won't tell you what that costs until they figure out how much money you've got. The price probably also varies with how close we are to the end of Oracle's sales quarter too.
The Apache Software Foundation appears to be having trouble getting Sun to cough up the Technical Compatibility Kit they promised without making the ASF agree to terms that violate open source principles, specifically No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor. They also believe that Sun is violating its own rules for the Java Community Process. Geir Magnusson Jr writes in an open letter to Sun:
Since August 2006, the ASF has been attempting to secure an acceptable license from Sun for the test kit for Java SE. This test kit, called the "Java Compatibility Kit" or "JCK", is needed by the Apache Harmony project to demonstrate its compatibility with the Java SE specification, as required by Sun's specification license. The JCK license Sun is offering imposes IP rights restrictions through limits on the "field of use" available to users of our software.
These restrictions are totally unacceptable to us. As I explain below, these restrictions are contrary to the terms of the Java Specification Participation Agreement (JSPA) - the governing rules of the JCP - to which Sun is contractually bound to comply as a signatory. The ASF has a proud history of support for open software ecosystems in which commercial software can flourish. However, Sun's JCK license protects portions of Sun's commercial Java business at the expense of ASF's open software. It prevents our users from using Apache software in certain fields of use. Such implicit or explicit threats of IP-based aggression give one actor overwhelming commercial advantages over the other participants in the ecosystem. In an open ecosystem, it must be the case that the necessary IP to implement a specification can be secured independently from the specific commercial interests of any one actor in the ecosystem, which is the basis of our objection to your offered terms.
Your restrictions violate the basic protections of the JCP, which ensure both that a) specification leads and expert groups produce open specifications, and b) anyone can implement and distribute compatible implementations of those specifications without fear of obligation to the specification lead or members of the expert group for any "necessary IP" needed to implement that specification. Specifically, the JSPA requires that
a specification lead cannot "impose any contractual condition or covenant that would limit or restrict the right of any licensee to create or distribute such Independent Implementations" (section 5.C.III)
a specification lead must license all necessary IP royalty-free to any compatible implementation of a specification (section 5.B)
Your terms are attempting to circumvent both of these requirements.
Besides holding back the Harmony project - a community-led open source project of the ASF since May of 2005 - this failure to comply with your contractual obligations poses serious risk to the credibility of the JCP as an open standards organization, and the reputation of Java itself as an open technology. We believe that this also threatens the general cooperative nature of the commercial Java ecosystem, puts at risk the long-standing positive relationship between Sun and the ASF, and probably between Sun and the broader open source community - all of which is key to the continued growth of Java.
Beyond the obligations of the JSPA, these limitations are also contrary to Sun's public promise that any Sun-led specification would be fully implementable and distributable as open source/free software. It shouldn't have to be mentioned that "fully implementable" includes passing the JCK, as required by the specification license. To this end, limitations on field of use for our users is contrary to the basic principles of open source licensing, and therefore these limitations would prevent distribution under any open source license, including our own.
Our objections to the offered license are clear and valid. The situation we are facing is grossly in conflict with the basic IP philosophy of the JCP, the concept of Java as an open standards-based ecosystem, Sun's public promises to the free and open source communities, and Sun's contractual obligations as a specification lead under the JSPA. The JCP was clearly designed to prevent any single actor from being able to exhibit this sort of market control. Additionally, it is contrary to both the spirit and letter of open source, the respect of which is a key element in Sun's stated business strategy.
Maybe it's time to update this old chestnut. The JCP has improved over the years, but apparently not enough. We're all equal in the JCP, but some of us are more equal than others.
Sun has submitted JSR-313, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) Specification , to the Java Community Process.
we propose two goals for this release - extensibility and profiles.
Extensibility
It would not be appropriate for the Java EE platform to grow without bound to include all the interesting and useful technologies desired by web and enterprise application developers. Instead, we believe it is desirable to enable more of these technologies to cleanly layer on or plug in to Java EE application servers. By adding more extensibility points and more service provider interfaces, these other technologies can plug in to platform implementations cleanly and efficiently, and be just as easy to use for developers as the facilities that are built into the platform.
Profiles
The reach of the Java EE platform has become so broad that it has lost some of its original focus. To refocus the Java EE platform on particular classes of developers and applications, we propose the introduction of Java EE platform Profiles. Profiles will reference the Java EE platform, as defined by the JCP process, and may include a subset of Java EE platform technologies, additional JCP technologies not part of the base Java EE platform, or both. In addition to defining the base Java EE platform, this specification will define the rules for referencing Java EE platform technologies in Java EE Profiles.
This expert group will also define the first version of a Java EE Web Profile - a subset of the Java EE platform targeted at web application development. This profile will provide a more gentle introduction to the Java EE platform, providing only those technologies needed by most web application developers, without the enterprise technologies that sometimes confuse such developers.
Pruning
The use of profiles is one tool to address the ever increasing size of the Java EE platform. It's also the case that some technologies included in the Java EE platform are no longer as relevant as they were when they were introduced to the platform. There needs to be a way to "prune" these technologies from the platform in a careful and orderly way that minimizes the impact to developers using these technologies while allowing the platform to grow even stronger. We propose to use the process defined by the Java SE expert group. In short, that process defines two steps:
- The Umbrella Expert Group (UEG) for release N of the platform decides to propose that a particular feature be removed. The specification for that release documents the proposal.
- The UEG for release N+1 decides whether to remove the feature from that release, retain it as a required component, or leave it in the "proposed removal" state for the next UEG to decide.
The result of successfully applying this policy to a feature is not the actual deletion of the feature but rather the conversion of the feature from a required component of the platform into an optional component. No actual removal from the specification occurs, although the feature may be removed from products at the choice of the product vendor.
As defined by that process, this expert group will consider technologies that should be marked for possible removal in a future Java EE platform specification. Possibilities include:
- EJB CMP - effectively replaced by Java Persistence
- JAX-RPC - effectively replaced by JAX-WS
This specification will only define the technologies that a future expert group may consider to make optional in a future platform specification, as described in the first step of the process. None of these technologies will be made optional in this release.
Other things on the table include SOA support, Java Authentication SPI for Containers, Timer for Application Servers, Work Manager for Application Servers, Web Beans, and JAX-RS. Comments are due by April 16.
The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.4, a Java class library that
enables an application to read configuration data from a variety of sources. Commons Configuration provides typed access to single, and multi-valued configuration parameters as demonstrated by the following code:
Double double = config.getDouble("number"); Integer integer = config.getInteger("number");Configuration parameters may be loaded from the following sources:
Different configuration sources can be mixed using a
- Properties files
- XML documents
- Property list files (.plist)
- JNDI
- JDBC Datasource
- System properties
- Applet parameters
- Servlet parameters
ConfigurationFactoryand aCompositeConfiguration. Additional sources of configuration parameters can be created by using custom configuration objects. This customization can be achieved by extendingAbstractConfigurationorAbstractFileConfiguration.
According to Olive Heger, "This release contains numerous bug fixes, but also adds some new features like improved interpolation support, a new configuration class for windows ini files, or a new reloading strategy that can be triggered using JMX. All changes are source and binary compatible with the previous release (1.3)."
The Jakarta Apache Project has released
version 4.1.36 of the
Tomcat open source servlet container
and official reference implementation of
the Java Servlet API 2.3 and Java Server Pages (JSP) 1.2.
This is a is mostly a bug fix release.
The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons-DBCP 1.2.2, a library for pooling database connections. According to the web page, "Creating a new connection for each user can be time consuming (often requiring multiple seconds of clock time), in order to perform a database transaction that might take milliseconds. Opening a connection per user can be unfeasible in a publicly-hosted Internet application where the number of simultaneous users can be very large. Accordingly, developers often wish to share a 'pool' of open connections between all of the application's current users. The number of users actually performing a request at any given time is usually a very small percentage of the total number of active users, and during request processing is the only time that a database connection is required. The application itself logs into the DBMS, and handles any user account issues internally." DBCP 1.2.2 fixes bugs and removes the dependence on Commons Collections. (Yay! Every dependency you can remove is a good thing.)
Holocene Software has posted Schmant 0.5,
a Java build tool that based on the scripting support in Java 6. It comes with a set of build tasks and features such as task executors for running build tasks in parallel execution threads and project repositories for working with sets of Java projects.
Schmant is published under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
Version 1.0.7 of Mantis, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) bug tracking system based on PHP and MySQL, has been released. This release fixes security bugs. All users should upgrade.
Google tells me that they still have space available for tomorrow night's (Thursday's) talk by Luiz Barroso, Google Distinguished Engineer, on "Watts, Faults, and Other Fascinating Dirty Words Computer Architects Can No Longer Afford to Ignore" in Manhattan's Chelsea. "Due to the overwhelming response from our last talk, we've decided to get creative with our space and resources, and will broadcast the presentation up from our Tech Talk space to our new Hemisphere's Cafe, which looks out over the city. Guests who arrive early will be directed to our Tech Talk space, and once we've reached capacity downstairs, we will begin sending guests upstairs to the Cafe. We will serve beer, wine, and hors d'oeuvres in both locations. At the conclusion of the talk, Luiz will join all of our guests in the Cafe's for continued Q&A and mingling." Preregistration is required..
On a related note, to the best of my knowledge, I am not talking tomorrow night to the NYC Java Study Group, whatever their Wiki says. We're trying to arrange something for a future date, but for the moment I've had to pull back on my own engagements so I can finish my next book. With any luck at all, that should be done soon, and I'll be able to take on some more work.
iSEC Partners has released the CyberVillainsCA, a free Java library for
on-the-fly generation, duplication and substitution of X.509
certificates. CyberVillainsCA is published under the GPL.
Sun has posted the first update release of Java 6 for Linux, Windows, and Solaris. This release fixes over 70 assorted bugs.
Tonight, Tuesday, April 3, is the latest iteration of Extreme Tuesday New York. This will once again be held at the Silver Swan at 41 East 20th Street, starting at 6:30. I'm not sure if I'll be there tonight or not. I'm in serious crunch mode on Refactoring HTML, so I may stay home and write.
Syncro Soft has released Syncro SVN Client 2.3, a $59 GUI Subversion client written in Java. Version 2.3 enables you to quickly find out what happened in a project or what a user worked on during a given period of time, improves the integration with bug tracking tools and adds application global ignores for unversioned resources displayed in the Working Copy view.
Yori Mihalakopoulos
has released a public preview of MochaCode, a Mac-only Java IDE.
Achim Westermann has released JChart2D 2.1, a thread-safe, libré (LGPL) Swing widget for drawing x-y plots. new features in this release include viewports, run-time configuration by popup menus for traces and charts, and flexible rendering of traces by discs, polylines, and filled polygons. Version 2.1.1 fixes bugs and is now compatible with Java 6.
Andres Almiray has released Json-lib 1.1, an open source Java library "for transforming beans, maps, collections, java arrays and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans." This release improves XML support.