Java News from Friday, April 2, 2004

And they said it couldn't be done! "The MusicBrainz Tagger application allows you to automatically look up the tracks in your music collection and then write clean metadata tags (ID3 tags or Vorbis comment fields) to your files. As you tag the files in your collection that MusicBrainz didn't recognize, you submit the acoustic fingerprints (TRM ids) of your files back to the server. Submitting acoustic fingerprints will allow MusicBrainz to automatically identify these tracks in the future, so that other people using the Tagger can benefit from the work you have done." Currently the GUI frontend only runs on Windows. However, the backend C library with perl and Python bindings is available for Linux and Mac OS X as well. Now if someone would just finish the port to Linux or Mac OS X (or implement the protocol in Java), and integrate it with an analog ripper, I'd have the tool I've been looking for.


TriActive JDO 2.1 (TJDO) has been released. TJDO is an open source implementation of Sun's Java Data Objects specification that is "designed to support transparent persistence using any JDBC-compliant database." Supported databases include Cloudscape, DB2, Firebird, MySQL, Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i, PostgreSQL, SAP DB, and MS SQL Server. Features include:

Version 2.1 adds transient transactional instances, non-persistent transactional fields, and byte array and Hashtable fields. TJDO is published under the Apache License.


The JavaPLT group at Rice University has posted a new build of DrJava, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java that supports interactive evaluation of expressions. This release makes various small improvements to the user interface. DrJava is published under the GPL and requires JDK 1.3 or later.


Anil Kumar has posted JavaDBF 0.4.0, an open source (LGPL) Java library for reading and writing dBase, Xbase, and dbf files.


Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 7.1.3. This is a free bug fix update for all 7.0 users. BBEdit is the $179 payware Macintosh text/HTML/XML/programmer's editor I normally use to write this page. Mac OS X 10.2 or later is required. Mac OS 9 is not supported.


"Wiz" has released DateChooser 1.2.5, an open source (GPL) widget for selecting a date from a calendar interface.