Java News from Tuesday, December 20, 2005

The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons Configuration 1.2, a Java class library that

enables an application to read configuration data from a variety of sources. Commons Configuration provides typed access to single, and multi-valued configuration parameters as demonstrated by the following code:

Double double = config.getDouble("number");
Integer integer = config.getInteger("number");

Configuration parameters may be loaded from the following sources:

• Properties files
• XML documents
• Property list files (.plist)
• JNDI
• JDBC Datasource
• System properties
• Applet parameters
• Servlet parameters

Different configuration sources can be mixed using a ConfigurationFactory and a CompositeConfiguration. Additional sources of configuration parameters can be created by using custom configuration objects. This customization can be achieved by extending AbstractConfiguration or AbstractFileConfiguration.

Apple has posted the second beta of Java 5 Release 4 for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on the Apple Developer Connection (first born child required). This is based on Sun's J2SE 1.5.0_05. This release uses Sun's rendering by default instead of native Quartz graphics. (This will probably change again before final release.) Most importantly it finaly makes Java 1.5 the default instead of 1.4. I'd hold off installing this unless one of the bugs Apple thinks they've fixed is affecting you.

Nathan Fiedler has released version 3.4 of JSwat, a graphical, stand-alone Java debugger built on top of the Java Platform Debugger Architecture. Features include breakpoints, source code viewing, single-stepping, watching variables, viewing stack frames, and printing variables. Version 3.4 adds several small features and fixes bugs. JSwat is now published under the Sun Public License. (It was previously published under the GPL.)

IBM has released Version 1.0.1 of their Java USB API implementation for Linux. This is published under the Common Public License.