Java News from Monday, January 26, 2004

Does anyone know of any third-party, non-Sun JSSE providers? Open or closed source, payware or free beer are all of interest. If so, can you please drop me a line with the URL. Thanks. So far I'm aware of Casey Marshall's Jessie. Is there anything else?

The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Collections 3.0, an open source library that extends and augments the Java Collections Framework. It includes:

• Bag interface for collections that have a number of copies of each object
• Buffer interface for collections that have a well defined removal order, like FIFOs
• BidiMap interface for maps that can be looked up from value to key as well and key to value
• MapIterator interface to provide simple and quick iteration over maps
• Type checking decorators to ensure that only instances of a certain type can be added
• Transforming decorators that alter each object as it is added to the collection
• Composite collections that make multiple collections look like one
• Ordered maps and sets that retain the order elements are added in, including an LRU based map
• Identity map that compares objects based on their identity (==) instead of the equals method
• Reference map that allows keys and/or values to be garbage collected under close control
• Many comparator implementations
• Many iterator implementations
• Adapter classes from array and enumerations to collections
• Utilities to test or create typical set-theory properties of collections such as union, intersection, and closure

Version 0.6 of jTDS has been released. jTDS is a 100% pure Java (Type 4) open source JDBC 2.0 driver for the Microsoft SQL Server series (6.5, 7.x and 2000). It's originally based on the work of the FreeTDS project. Besides fixing bugs, Version 0.6 provides basic BLOB and CLOB support and implements PreparedStatement.SetAsciiStream and SetUnicodeStream. jTDS is published under a BSD license.

Bodo Tasche has posted JCalendar 0.7.51, an open source calendar GUI widget for Java that "provides a ComboBox (JCalendarComboBox) for selecting a Date and a simple Panel (JCalendarPanel) for showing and editing a Date." This release adds support for Spanish and Chinese and fixes a few bugs. JCalendar is published under a BSD license.

Websina has released BugZero 3.3.3, a $999 payware Web-based bug tracking system that supports multiple projects, group-based access, automatic bug assignment, file attachment, email notification, and metric reports. Bug Zero is written in Java and can run on top of various backend databases including MySQL. 3.3.3 is a bug fix release.