Mark Stephens has released JPedal 2.25, a pure Java library for extracting content from PDF files and rasterizing them. Text fragments are extracted as XML elements with font and location information. Images are extracted in both their raw formats and their clipped and scaled formats as TIFF, PNG, or JPEG files. According to Stephens, "version 2.25 adds a number of significant features, the most major being support for outlines and thumbnails of the screens and ability to highlight text onscreen....This is a major release which also includes a large number well of fixes and substantial speed improvements. JPedal is published under the GPL.
Sun has submitted Java Specification Request 255, Java Management Extensions (JMX) Specification, version 2.0, to the Java Community Process. According to the JSR,
This specification will update the JMX and JMX Remote APIs to improve existing interfaces, notably with respect to ease-of-use, and to add new functionality whose usefulness has become clear since those APIs were completed. Some key changes that are proposed are:
- Use generics in the JMX API, for example have MBeanServer.queryNames return Set rather than just Set.
- Use annotations to make writing MBeans easier.
- Make Open MBeans easier to use to address interoperability and versioning concerns.
- Generalize monitors so that they can monitor attributes that are not simple types, and so that their thresholding is customizable.
- Support cascaded (federated) MBean Servers.
It is a key goal of this JSR to be incorporated into version 6.0 of the J2SE platform (Mustang), and this might mean that some of these proposed changes end up being postponed to a later JSR.
Comments are due by October 4.