Java News from Friday, June 10, 2005

From the "It's about time" department, I note with relief that IBM has finally released the Java USB API specification in the Java Community Process. This should have been done five years ago. Maybe now they can start thinking about Firewire.


The Apache Commons Project has released Commons Transaction 1.1, an open source Java class library that "provides utility classes commonly used in transactional Java programming. Version 1.1 aims at polishing (interface) oddities, improving locking and making the file store more flexible. Locking now is much more flexible, extensible and allows for rudimentary transaction management. There is a new lock manager that hides locks from the user and keeps track of all of them allowing for deadlock detection and more convenient management."


Mike Cannon-Brookes

Atlassian has released version 3.2 of JIRA, a $1200-$4800 payware J2EE-based bug tracking and project management server application. Version 3.2 improves search performance and adds support for multiple Subversion repositories. I've been using Jira lately with Jaxen and Apache. It's a definite improvement over Bugzilla. I'm not sure it really does anything that Bugzilla doesn't do (at least not anything I use) but the user interface is about a hundred times cleaner.


Michael Fuchs has posted version 0.64.2 of his DocBook Doclet that creates DocBook SGML and XML documents from JavaDoc. This release fixes some bugs.