The Gnu Project has released Emacs 23.1 open source editor (GPL license). New features in this release include:
- Improved Unicode support (the internal character representation is now based on UTF-8).
- Font rendering with Fontconfig and Xft.
- Support for using X displays and text terminals in one session, and for running as a daemon.
- Shift-selection.
- Smarter minibuffer completion.
- Per-buffer text scaling.
- Directory-local variables.
It also adds support for editing XML documents with on-the-fly validation in nXML mode and editing Ruby programs.
Bare Bones Software has released version 9.2.1 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac, my favorite XML editor on any platforms, what I'm using to type these very words.
This is a bug fix release.
New copies cost $125. Upgrades from 9.x are free.
Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.
The Apache Jakarta Commons Team has released version 1.5.2 of their open source Commons Pool object pooling API. This is a bug fix release.
Google has posted version 1.2.2 of the AppEngine for Java SDK. "With App Engine, you can build web applications using standard Java technologies and run them on Google's scalable infrastructure. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.":
App Engine uses the Java Servlet standard for web applications. You provide your app's servlet classes, JavaServer Pages (JSPs), static files and data files, along with the deployment descriptor (the web.xml file) and other configuration files, in a standard WAR directory structure. App Engine serves requests by invoking servlets according to the deployment descriptor.
The JVM runs in a secured "sandbox" environment to isolate your application for service and security. The sandbox ensures that apps can only perform actions that do not interfere with the performance and scalability of other apps. For instance, an app cannot spawn threads, write data to the local file system or make arbitrary network connections. An app also cannot use JNI or other native code. The JVM can execute any Java bytecode that operates within the sandbox restrictions.
This appears to mostly be a bug fix and performance enhancement release, though it also increases the "file limit from 1000 files to 3000 files, and check the limit up-front" (though I'm not quite sure what exactly that means, but presumably it's a good thing.)
JetBrains has posted the first milestone IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 (and here I haven't even gotten around to trying IDEA 8.0 yet). New features include:
- Global unused symbols highlighting
- Easy class exclusion from completion & auto-import
- Built-in spell checker (They didn't have this already?!)
- Auto-folding (ditto?!)
- Subversion 1.6
- JEE 6
- OSGI (Bleah.)
- Android (Yay!)
- Flex (Interesting choice)
- PHP (About time!)
- UML (Boo!)
Sun has released NetBeans 6.7, its open source IDE for Java. New features in this version include:
- Integration with Project Kenai, "a collaborative environment where developers can host their open-source projects. With NetBeans and Kenai, a team of developers can create projects, edit, debug, build, and commit code, and have discussions all through one easy-to-use interface."
- Maven support
- GlassFish and Hudson integrations
- JavaScript 1.7
- Ruby Remote Debugging
- Java ME SDK 3.0