Scott McNealy makes an interesting offhand comment at the end of Government Computer News's much reported article about Sun's refusal to open source Java as IBM wants them to. “Go open source with DB2 and then you can tell me what to do with my assets.” Sounds like a deal to me. I doubt McNealy really meant what he said, but why not call him on it? All the money in DB2 is in hardware sales, support contracts, and consulting anyway. How about it IBM? Tit for Tat. You open source DB2 under the GPL and Sun does the same with Java. Java crushes .NET. DB2 stomps Oracle. Everybody wins.
Sun has posted posted version 1.4.2_04 of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Software Development Kit (SDK). It's not immediately obvious what's new in this release, but presumably various bugs have been fixed.
Mirko Nasato has posted Java OpenOffice Template Tools (Joott), a Java library for working with OpenOffice.org documents, especially Writer templates. Joott is published under a BSD license.
Robert Oloffson has posted version 0.41 of Java Memory Profiler (JMP). JMP uses the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI) interface to track objects and method times in a JVM. It uses a GTK+ interface to display statistics. The current instance count and the total amount of memory for each class is shown as is the total time spent in each method. This release makes it possible to ask for objects in the current reset level only and can show the owners of a given string and a given instance. JMP is written in C for Linux.
JCraft, Inc has posted JSch 0.1.14, a pure Java implementation of SSH2 that supports port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc. JSch is released under a BSD license. This release fixes bugs.
IBM's alphaWorks has released version 1.2 of the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4, a Java class library for working with MPEG-4 video and audio. Version 1.2 adds HTTP tunneling and interleaving to support firewall and NAT traversal in the improves the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).