Java News from Thursday, March 31, 2005

NEW! Jayasoft has released Ivy 0.8, a free Java based dependency manager, that features transitive dependencies, Ant integration, Maven compatibility, and continuous integration. Personally I'm trying to eliminate dependencies from my code. I just spent quite a bit of effort to remove XOM's dependency on IBM's ICU, and to bundle Jaxen directly into the main JAR file rather than distributing it separately. In fact, in Java 1.4 and later only the main XOM JAR archive should be required for almost all uses. (XOMTestCase still requires junit.jar. However, if you're using that class you probably already have JUnit in your classpath.) The fewer dependencies a code base has, the easier it is to install and deploy.


Nathan Fiedler has released version 2.34 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 2.34 improves French localizaation, better supports JSP and Nice, and fixes bugs. JSwat is published under the GPL.