Registration is now open for JavaOne 2008 to take place May 6-9 at Moscone in San Francisco. Cost is $1595 if you register by Monday, April 7, 2008, $1775 after that. I'm probably not going this year, though I'm not absolutely certain of that yet.
The Apache Project has released ServiceMix 3.2.1, an open source distributed Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and SOA toolkit built from the ground up on the semantics and APIs of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification JSR 208 and released under the Apache license.
Aqris Software has released RefactorIT 2.6, a closed-source tool that can read Java source code and rewrite it by means of automated refactorings such as Rename Field/Method/Variable/Class/Package, Extract Method or Move Type. RefactorIT can be run standalone or installed as an add-in to IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, and JBuilder. Version 2.2 is now free-as-in-beer.
JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0.2. This is a bug fix release. IDEA is $499 payware. Upgrades from pre-7.0 versions are $299.
Sun has posted the call for participation and registration for CommunityOne, a free-as-in-beer one-day event on May 5 (right before JavaOne) dedicated to open source is a meeting of the minds for developers interested in free and open source projects. Proposals are due by January 31. Attendees also get free access to the JavaOne Pavilion and General Sessions on Tuesday, May 6.
Man bites dog. The Java Community Process SE/EE Executive Committee has not approved JSR 323 - Strong Mobility for Java. This is the strongest No vote I've ever seen in the JCP: 8 no votes, 3 abstentions, and 5 failures to vote. No one voted yes. Here's Sun's comment:
Sun believes this could be an interesting area of research, but does not yet see the kind of community or vendor support that would motivate standardizing on a mechanism in the JCP. Currently we think that os virtualization techniques are providing more complete solutions for the kind of problems outlined in this proposal.
We would encourage the spec lead and supporters to explore venues such as openjdk.org as a means to continue the research and solicit feedback from the wider developer community.
This seems to be an academic project with no corporate backing. That probably contributed to its rejection.
Recently published spec downloads from the Java Community Process seem to be thoroughly broken and have been for a few days now. Everything I try to download ends in "File not found." I can download older versions but not the latest like the Location API 2.0 proposed final draft. Is anyone else noticing this or is it just me? I've tried multiple browsers with the same results. I'm not sure if anyone besides me ever actually reads these things. I really wish Sun would start publishing these documents with straight, raw HTML and HTTP. It would make reading them so much simpler.
Fixtures for Easy Software Testing has posted FEST-Swing 0.8, a Java library that provides a fluent interface for functional Swing GUI testing. Here's an example they give of testing that an error message is displayed if the user forgets to enter their password when logging in:
dialog.comboBox("domain").select("Users");
dialog.textBox("username").enterText("leia.organa");
dialog.button("login").click();
dialog.optionPane().requireErrorMessage().requireMessage("Please enter your password")Looks good but the devil is in the details. I'll have to play with this some before I can see if they've finally cracked this tough nut.
Version 1.1.1 of Mantis, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) bug tracking system based on PHP and MySQL, has been posted. This is a bug fix release.
David Gilbert has released JFreeChart 1.0.9. "This release addresses a security issue affecting the creation of HTML image maps, adds a few minor API enhancements and fixes various bugs." JFreeChart is free software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL), and requires Java version 1.3.1 or later.
MySQL A.B. has released Eventum 2.1.1, an open source issue tracking system designed for the needs of technical support teams in particular. This is mostly a bug fix release. Eventum is published under the GPL.
The Apache Jakarta Commons Team has released Commons Pool 1.4.
Pool provides an Object-pooling API, with three major aspects:
- A generic object pool interface that clients and implementors can use to provide easily interchangable pooling implementations.
- A toolkit for creating modular object pools.
- Several general purpose pool implementations.
"Version 1.4 is a maintenance release including numerous bug fixes. This release is source and binary compatible with version 1.3 of commons pool, but there are some behavior changes introduced to resolve bugs, remove ambiguity or improve robustness."
Sun's buying MySQL. This could be interesting. I generally dislike mergers, and Sun has a really bad track record of buying companies and killing them (anyone remember Cobalt?) but at least this means MySQL won't go to Oracle or Microsoft. Maybe Sun can even take MySQL the last mile it needs to go to replace Oracle for even the largest databases.
javaBin has posted the call for presentations for JavaZone 2008, to take place in Oslo, Norway on 17-18 September 17 and 18 with somewhere around 2000+ attendees. The following topics will be covered by JavaZone 2008:
Submissions are due by March 14. Talks take place in both English and Norwegian.
This weekend while out of town I finally noticed that the Atom and RSS feeds on The Cafes are 404. I’m not sure why exactly yet. It may have to do with the upgrade to WordPress 2.3.2 or it my be a result of the switch to shared hosting on pair.com. I’m out of town at the moment but I hope to fix it Tuesday when I return.
elharo.com seems to be completely down. I’m not sure why. I may just need to reboot the server when I get home. I haven’t yet transitioned that site to pair.com. Instead it’s still sitting on the Mac Mini in my office.
I'm out of town for the next few days so updates will be even slower than usual until I return.
Sun posted what I think was the JDK 1.6.0_04 a day or two ago, but seems to have pulled it off the web site when I just checked. I never saw release notes posted, and I'm not sure what went wrong; but I did notice that the two Windows systems that tried to auto-update both displayed some line noise in the dialog box that looked like an encoding gone wrong.
The Mac Mini that hosts xom.nu, The Cafes, and Mokka mit Schlag seems to have died. I'll bring them back as soon as I can, but it may take a couple of days.
Update: it appears the problem is simply a dead power brick. I swapped in the power adapter from my wife's Mini and the server booted right up. However since I doubt she'll be willing to go computerless until I can find a new brick, www.elharo.com will likely go down again shortly. The server should be back up more permanently just as soon as I can find a new power brick or move the sites to a shared host, whichever comes first.
The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.5, 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, "The 1.5 release contains numerous bug fixes. Most of the addressed bugs are not really critical. There are also a few new features, e.g. a new Configuration class for accessing environment variables. Commons Configuration 1.5 is fully binary compatible to the previous version."
Sun has posted the proposed final draft version of JSR-286 Java Portlet Specification 2.0 . New features in 2.0 include:
Nokia has posted the second public review draft of JSR-279 Service Connection API for Java ME.
The ServiceConnection API brings services to the Java ME and provides uniform access to different services based on state-of-the-art technologies such as SOAP, REST, Atom, as well as internal services. In order to make use of services as simply as possible, the API removes the burden of high-level protocols, complex state machines, and other logic from the user. Frameworks are used to increase user convenience by providing service discovery, authentication, and ready-made message skeletons which can be validated on-line. Representation of the message can be easily switched, for example, between XML or JSON, or Atom and RSS.
The ServiceConnection API does not refer to any specific protocol used to transport messages. Neither does it refer to any specific authentication and other security mechanisms, discovery, or any other characteristics of a service. The fact that messages are sent and received, for example, using SOAP over HTTP, should show to the user as little as possible.
The API is in these packages:
- javax.microedition.service
- javax.microedition.service.atom
- javax.microedition.service.schema
Motorola has posted a public review draft of JSR 271 - JMobile Information Device Profile 3 . According to the draft:
MIDP 3.0 introduces a number of new features that build upon the previous success of MIDP. These new features are intended to enable a wide range of applications and services, as well as to improve the stability, and predictability of MIDP implementations. These new features are:
- Support for both CLDC and CDC
- System and Application Events
- Concurrency
- InterMIDlet Communication
- RMS Data Provisioning & RMS Interchange File Format
- Shared Components (LIBlets)
- MIDlet Categories (Screen Savers, Idle Screen MIDlets, Auto Start MIDlets)
- Multiple MIDlet Suite Signers
- LCDUI enhancements: Support for multiple displays, FileSelector, tabs
Version 1.1 of Mantis, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) bug tracking system based on PHP and MySQL, has been posted. New features in 1.1 include: