Bill Pugh of the University of Maryland has released FindBugs 1.3.7, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. New bug detectors in this release include "vacuous/useless calls to EasyMock methods, and of generic signatures that proclaim the use of unhashable classes in ways that require that they be hashed."
Bare Bones Software has released version 9.1 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac and what I'm using to type these very words.
Version 9.1 "now includes a copy of Consolas Regular, an excellent antialiased code editing font. This font is licensed from Ascender Corporation for use only with BBEdit."
New copies cost $125.Upgrades from 9.0 are free.
Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.
The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.6, 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:
- Properties files
- XML documents
- Property list files (.plist)
- JNDI
- JDBC Datasource
- System properties
- Applet parameters
- Servlet parameters
Different configuration sources can be mixed using a
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 is in line with the previous 1.5 release: there are no big changes or spectacular new features, but a lot of smaller bug fixes and enhancements. There are also a few new features, e.g. support for the xml:space attribute in XMLConfiguration, or multiple enhancements of DefaultConfigurationBuilder. All changes are source and binary compatible with the previous release."
Subversion 1.5.5, an open source version control system designed to replace CVS, has been released.
According to Hyrum K. Wright,
"This release includes a number of user-requested bug fixes,
as well as significant improvements to 'svn merge --reintegrate'. "
Ericsson has posted the public review draft of JSR-319: Availability Management for Java to the Java Community Process (JCP). According to the JSR,
This specification defines how an availability management framework can supervise and control Java EE server instances, applications and modules in order to achieve high availability.
The following entities are important in the architecture:
- Availability Management Framework. An availability management framework coordinates redundant resources within a cluster to deliver a system with no single point of failure and it is the entity that controls and supervises the Java runtime entities.
- Availability Agent. The availability agent is the entity that, on behalf of the availability management framework, interacts with the availability executor.
- Availability Commands. The availability commands are executables used by the availability management framework to start or to cleanup Java processes.
- Availability Executor. The availability executor is the entity that performs the requests of the availability agent and it is an integrated part of the Java EE application server.
- Availability Container. The availability container is a Java process, typically a Java EE server instance, and it provides the execution environment for availability units.
- Availability Unit. The availability unit is a runtime entity, typically a Java EE application or stand-alone module, executing some service within an availability container.
Comments are due by January 19.
ej-technologies GmbH has released version 5.2 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:
- Biggest objects view in heap walker showing the objects that retain most memory
- View filters for snapshot comparison views
- Hiding of selected nodes in call tree and hot spot views
- Support for HP-UX on Itanium
- IDE integrations for IDEA 8, JDeveloper 11g and Netbeans 6.5
Upgrades from 5.x are free.
Sun has posted the public review draft of JSR-315, Java Servlet 3.0 Specification (though it seems to be marked as a proposed final draft?). The section on what's new doesn't seem to have been written yet. I do note that query string parsing is still under-specified, and a lot of the javaDoc relies on very old-fashioned, never-quite-specified idea like CGI environment variables. Comments are due by January 12, and I will be sending in a few.
JNetDirect has released JSQLConnect 5.85, a $1750 payware native type 4 JDBC driver for Microsoft SQL Server. New Version of JSQLConnect JSQLConnect 5.85 New features in 5.85 include enhanced BigDecimal handling and IPv6 address support.
Sun has released Java SE 6 Update 11. The main focus of this release is fixing bugs. My personal favorite is that certain malformed UTF-8 sequences are now rejected. Java's Unicode handling still isn't really correct, but at least now it's less dangerous.
Version 1.1.6 of Mantis, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) bug tracking system based on PHP and MySQL, has been posted. This is a serious bug fix release. All users should upgrade.
The Apache Jakarta Project has posted a beta POI 3.5, an open source Java library for "manipulating various file formats based upon Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format. OLE 2 Compound Document Format based files include most Microsoft Office files such as XLS and DOC." Version 3.5 adds support for Microsoft's new OOXML (Office Open XML) formats.
Sun has released its rich internet application development platform JavaFX 1.0 for Windows and Mac. Linux and Solaris are notably absent. Umm, wasn't Java supposed to save us from platform-dependent development? Interestingly, Java 6 is required on Windows, but only Java 5 on the Mac. (Why not just go Java 5 or later on all platforms?)
Had this been done 10 years ago, JavaFx would have been a game changer, but now? Meh. There are still a lot of missing pieces here, but the really critical question is what can be done with JavaFX that can't be done with Flash or AJAX. If the answer is, nothing, then JavaFX is an also-ran: too little, too late. New development platforms only succeed when they open up new vistas to developers. The same thing again, even the same thing better, never succeeds. Right now I can't imagine a rich client app that could be built with JavaFX and couldn't be built with Flash. Unless there is such a program, JavaFX is doomed.
The Apache Software Foundation has posted milestone 8 of Harmony 5.0, an open source implementation of the Java 5 platform. "Apache Harmony 5.0M8 is the latest stable build containing numerous bug fixes, and enhancements to the policytool and pack200 support."
Syncro Soft has released Syncro SVN Client 4.1, a $99 GUI Subversion client written in Java. Version 4.1 "nt adds a create patch wizard, a dialog for quickly resolving conflicts resulted from a merge action and considerable performance improvements."
The Mozilla Project has released Bugzilla 3.2, the open source bug tracking system we all despise, but this release is supposed to have a much improved UI. In particular, "Bugzilla 3.2 has had some UI assistance from the NASA Human-Computer Interaction department and the new Bugzilla User Interface Team. In particular, you will notice a massively redesigned bug editing form, in addition to our new skin." New features include Custom Status Workflow, Custom Field Types, improved UTF-8 support, and experimental support for Oracle as a backend (but really, isn't that just pouring salt in an already open wound? Bugzilla alone satisfies my masochism quotient for the year without rubbing Oracle into the mix.)