Java News from Friday, December 5, 2003

For the last couple of years I was buying more music than I had in over a decade, almost all of it discovered on Gnutella. I stopped doing that when the RIAA started suing twelve year old girls in housing projects though. Yesterday I discovered RIAA Radar, a site that will tell you whether a CD you're contemplating buying is published by the RIAA or not. I'm pleased to report that I can buy the new Ingrid Lucia CD and the complete ouevre of Black Box Recorder in good conscience. On the other hand, only one of Sarah Connor's albums is RIAA free, and I can't touch the new Jeanette Biedermann CD. (But that's OK. I already found out on Gnutella that it sucked.) So far this only works for albums that are available from Amazon in the U.S. It would be helpful if the radar were extended to cover other stores, and other countries; but at least now I can buy CDs again.


The third beta of Ant 1.6, the popular open source build tool, has been posted by the Apache Project. "Ant 1.6 adds a lot of new features, most prominently support for XML namespaces as well as a new concept of Ant libraries that makes use of namespaces to avoid name clashes of custom tasks." Java 1.2 or later is required. Java 1.1 is no longer supported.


WEBSina has released JLicense 2.6.1, a simple Java library for creating and validating license keys. The binary is free beer. Source code will cost you $50.


JCraft, Inc has posted JSch 0.1.11, a pure Java implementation of SSH2 that supports port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc. JSch is released under a BSD license. This release supports DSA keypair generation and fixes bugs.



R. Rawson-Tetley has posted SwingWT 0.74, 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 version adds support for JEditorPane/HTML, automatic Swing-style event dispatching, and AbstractButton and AWT cursors. SwingWT is dual licensed under the Common Public License and the LGPL.