Java News from Thursday, November 6, 2003

The Jakarta Apache Project has released Tomcat 5.0.14, the servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). Tomcat 5.0 implements version 2.4 of the Java Servlet API 2.4 and version 2.0 of Java Server Pages. The numbering is a little confusing. but this appears to be the third beta release in the 5.0 series. It should really be numbered 5.0b3. Only users interested in testing beta software and reporting bugs should upgrade. Less adventurous users may wish to upgrade to the more stable 4.1.29 release.

The Apache Jakarta Project has released Jakarta Commons Primitives 1.0. This is a set of container classes (List, Iterator, Collection, etc.) for holding the Java's eight primitive data types (boolean, byte, char, double, float, int, long, and short). They claim these are "faster, smaller and easier to work with than their purely Object based alternatives."

The Apache Jakarta Project has posted the first release candidate of POI 2.0, 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."

IBM's alphaWorks has updated their Focus code coverage tool. "FoCuS is a tool that implements the functional coverage methodology and improves testing of applications by providing detailed coverage information on the areas in which testing is lacking. Functional coverage refers to testing the performance and functionality of an e-business application and making sure that the design of the test is complete and covers every aspect of what the application is meant to do." This release makes some speed ups and adds an API for hole analysis.