Java News from Wednesday, October 13, 2004

I've decided to go ahead and make the switch to CSS for this page. Only one person objected, (someone who used WebTV to read the site on the treadmill in the gym) and I was able to satisfy him with the No-frills version of this page. I'm still not sure I'd recommend a CSS layout for a consumer facing web site, but all you alpha geeks who come here seem to all have recent enough browsers to handle CSS. Kudos. :-) On the other hand if anyone is having trouble with this page, the old tables based layout will still be available for the foreseeable future at http://www.cafeaulait.org/tables.shtml.

Slashdot is collecting interview questions for Neal Stephenson. One of the proposals is to ask him to explain Enoch Root.

Sun has posted the final versions of twelve Java Specification requests (JSRs) that describe new features in Java 1.5:

• JSR-013 Decimal Arithmetic Enhancement
• JSR-014 Add Generic Types to the Java Programming Language
• JSR-133 Java Memory Model and Thread Specification
• JSR-163 Java Platform Profiling Architecture
• JSR-166 Concurrency Utilities
• JSR-174 Monitoring and Management Specification for the Java Virtual Machine
• JSR-175 A Metadata Facility for the Java Programming Language
• JSR-176 J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) Release Contents
• JSR-200 Network Transfer Format for Java Archives
• JSR-201 Extending the Java Programming Language with Enumerations, Autoboxing, Enhanced for loops and Static Import
• JSR-204 Unicode Supplementary Character Support
• JSR-206 Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.3

BEA has posted the public review draft specification of JSR 181, Web Services Metadata for the Java Platform. This seems to describe a means of generating WSDL from Java code and Java code from WSDL using Java 1.5 annotations. Comments are due by October 25.

Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.60 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This release adds a "Constant Field Values" appendix and can handle numeric character references.

Gaudenz Alder has released JGraph 5.1, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) graph component for Swing that requires Java 1.4 or later. JGraph is accompanied by Graphpad, an open-source diagram editor for Swing that offers Automatic Layout, Printing, Zoom, and much more. It is available in English, German and French. Version 5.1 fixes some bugs and adds a few pieces of functionality to the API.

Nokia has posted proposed final draft of JSR-234 Advanced Multimedia Supplements. This is a J2ME API for controlling multimedia features like cameras, videocameras, and audio playback on newer devices such as camera phones.

jPOS 1.4.8 has been released. jPOS is an "ISO-8583 library/framework that can be used to implement financial interchanges, protocol converters, payment gateways, credit card verification clients and servers (merchant/issuer/acquirer)." Alejandro Revilla writes, "This new version represents over a year of hard work that includes bugfixes, performance tuning, new components, new TransactionManager framework, etc."