Java News from Sunday, January 11, 2004

Marc Schoenefeld has written JChains, a custom security manager framework that "records the permissions needed for the codebases (jars) of j2se applications running under access control of a security manager. The resulting policy file is recorded while running the program and is useful as a starting point when developing a security policy for a java application. When run against libraries when source is not available it is useful for reverse engineering, revealing the permission needed to use the libraries. This is helpful when you do not trust the jar , and do not want to grant it the AllPermission free ride ticket." Source code has not yet been released.


Version 2.1.1 of EJBCA, an open source, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Certificate Authority, has been released. EJBCA can be used standalone or integrated into other J2EE application. It supports multiple levels of certificate authorities, individual enrollment and batch production of certificates, PKCS12 and PEM export, configurable certificate contents. revocation and certificate revocation lists, and more. Version 2.0 adds a Web GUI for administration, speed ups, soft configurable types of signing device, new access control on method invocation, an option to generate JKS or PEM keystores, a CertificatePolicies extension, a return PKCS7 with full path to browsers, new configurable certificate profiles, more alternative names, user profiles for administrators of different groups, improved serial number generation, and a new logging mechanism. 2.1.1 is a bug fix release. EJBCA is published under the LGPL.


Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.53.2 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This release works better on Windows, and fixes some bugs.


R. Rawson-Tetley has posted SwingWT 0.77, 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 improves support for many components and fixes numerous bugs. SwingWT is dual licensed under the Common Public License and the LGPL.