David Hovemeyer and Bill Pugh have posted FindBugs 0.8.5, an automated open source tool for finding potential bugs in Java code. This release includes several new detectors including:
equals() on arrays (Dave Brosius)instanceof usage where inheritance can be determined statically As usual, I tested this release on the latest XOM code base. It didn't find any major bugs, but it did locate several less than optimal places in my code including two unused fields I could delete, two local variables I could eliminate along with the method calls that initialized them, and one place where I wasn't properly closing a file on all paths out of a method. False positives were few, mostly involving places where I was deliberately catching and ignoring an exception. Java 1.4 or later is required. FindBugs is published under the LGPL.
The Apache Commons Group has posted Betwixt 0.6, an open source Java class library that "provides an XML introspection mechanism for mapping beans to XML in a flexible way. It is implemented using an XMLIntrospector and XMLBeanInfo classes which are similar to the standard Introspector and BeanInfo from the Java Beans specification....Betwixt release 0.6 is the first release containing the refactored codebase featuring an improved design. This is a service release for those who have been using the code from the CVS branch and offers an easy, compatible upgrade path for those using the 0.5 design. It is recommended that all users should upgrade to this release since the 0.5 design is no longer actively supported and is limited in terms of functionality."
Julien Ponge has released IzPack 3.6.1., an open source tool for building cross-platform installers in Java. 3.6.1is a bug fix release. It's published under the GPL.
JPOX 1.0.4 is an open source implementation of Java Data Objects (JDO) JDO 1.0.1 that provides transparent persistence to Java objects. It supports most major SQL databases and can be queried using either JDOQL or SQL. It's published under an Apache-like License. This is a bug fix release.
The Jakarta Apache Project has posted Tomcat 5.5.3, an open source servlet container for the Apache web server and the official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API and Java Server Pages (JSP). "Tomcat 5.5 is designed to run on J2SE 5.0 and later, and requires configuration to run on J2SE 1.4....In addition, Tomcat 5.5 uses the Eclipse JDT Java compiler for compiling JSP pages. This means you no longer need to have the complete Java Development Kit (JDK) to run Tomcat, but a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is sufficient. The Eclipse JDT Java compiler is bundled with the binary Tomcat distributions. Tomcat can also be configured to use the compiler from the JDK to compile JSPs, or any other Java compiler supported by Apache Ant." This implements version 2.4 of the Java Servlet API 2.4 and version 2.0 of Java Server Pages. The version numbering is funky. This is really more like an alpha release and is definitely not considered to be ready for production.