Java News from Tuesday, June 8, 2004

Sun has launched JDesktop Integration Components API (JDIC) on java.net. "The JDesktop Integration Components (JDIC) project aims to make Java™ technology-based applications ("Java applications") first-class citizens of current desktop platforms without sacrificing platform independence. JDIC provides Java applications with access to facilities provided by the native desktop such as the mailer, the browser, and registered document viewing applications. Additionally it provides the mechanisms by which Java applications can integrate into the native desktop such as registering Java applications as document viewers on the desktop and creating installer packages. JDIC consists of a collection of Java packages (JDIC API), all with the package name prefix org.jdesktop.jdic, and a JNLP application packaging tool (JDIC Packager)." Surprisingly, this is free software (LGPL) and is not going through the JCP, at least not yet. via the LGPL.

EJBCA 3.0, 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 3.0 adds support for OCSP and allows several certificate authorities to run in one instance of EJBCA. It is not backwards compatible with EJBCA 2.1 without a database upgrade. EJBCA is published under the LGPL.

Diomidis Spinellis has released UMLGraph 2.4, an open source (BSD license) tool for declaratively specifying UML diagrams. UMLGraph uses text files that look vaguely like source code to specify how UML class and sequence diagrams are drawn. A doclet converts this into a Graphviz diagram that can be easily converted to Postscript, GIF, SVG, JPEG, etc. Version 2.4 makes some small improvements, especially with regrd to generation of hyperlinks.

Michael B. Allen's posted jCIFS 0.9.2, a free (LGPL) SMB client library written in pure Java. It supports Unicode, named pipes, batching, multiplexing I/O of threaded callers, encrypted authentication, full transactions, domain/workgroup/host/share/file enumeration, NetBIOS sockets and name services, the smb:// URL protocol handler, RAP calls, and more. The API is similar to java.io.File. Version 0.9.2 fixes a few bugs.