Java News from Tuesday, February 10, 2004

The Software Development West 2004 Expo in Santa Clara next month (March 15-19) is looking for a few more volunteers to man doors, distribute notes, and similar tasks. For each day a you volunteer you get to attend the conference for a day free, and most volunteer days involve nothing more than sitting in the back of the room listenting to the presentation, and collecting eval forms at the end; so really, it's a nice way to attend the show for free.


The first beta of NetBeans 3.6, Sun's semi-official open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java, has been released. The NetBeans team wasn't originally planning a 3.6 release, until it became obvious that Eclipse was eroding their customer base at a rate that was likely to leave them with a market share somewhere just above Roaster's if they waited till 4.0 was ready. The major new feature in 3.6 is JUnit integration. There are also lots of small improvements throughout the IDE. NetBeans is written in Java and should run on any reasonably modern JVM.


Sebastiano Vigna has released version 4.1 of fastUtil, a collection of type-specific Java maps and sets with a small memory footprint and faster access and insertion. The classes implement their standard counterpart interfaces such as java.util.Map and can be plugged into existing code. However, they also contain type-specific methods. For instance, the CharList class has not only the usual add(Object o) method but also an add(char c) method. Version 4.1 enables custom hash strategies. fastUtil is published under the Gnu Lesser General Public License (LGPL).


XtremeJ Corp has released the XtremeJ Management Console 2.0, an Eclipse bbased user interface for Java management Extension (JMX) based services within a JMX-enabled application server. XtremeJ v2.0 comes in three editions: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. The Standard Edition is available for free download. Professional and Enterprise editions start at $395. The Enterprise Edition can take and compare server/MBean snapshots; build personalized templates; and develop, manage, and execute JMX scripts from the same Eclipse IDE. Supported applications server include JBoss 3.0 and later, WebLOgic 6.1 and later, WebSphere 5.0, Tomcat 4.1 and later, JOnAS 3.3.x and several others.