Java News from Thursday, October 13, 2005

IBM has posted a beta of their Java 5 VM for Linux and AIX.

The Jakarta Apache Project has posted the fourth release candidate of HTTPClient 3.0. New features in 3.0 include:

• New preference architecture
• Improved exception handling framework
• Granular non-standards configuration and tracking
• Improved HTTP Version configuration and tracking
• Support for streaming entities
• Support for tunneled HTTP proxies via the ProxyClient
• Ability to abort execution of HTTP methods
• Support for closing idle connections
• Support for JDK1.4 connect timeout through reflection
• Support for connection manager shutdown
• Improved authentication framework
• Plug-in mechanism for authentication modules
• Interactive authentication support
• Alternate authentication support
• Cookie specification plug-in mechanism
• 'Ignore cookies' cookie policy
• Improved Netscape cookie support
• Cross-site redirect support

RC4 fixes assorted bugs.

Matthias Kempka has released Coverlipse 0.9.4, an open source (Common Public License) Eclipse 3.1 plugin for code coverage visualization of JUnit tests. Interestingly, the code coverage can be shown right in the Java editor in Eclipse. This is the first release that can be installed through the Eclipse update mechanism.

I tried this out on a simple test case for a single class, and it worked beautifully. If this scales to larger projects, this should make it quite a bit easier to fill in holes in test coverage without going to the trouble of setting up Clover or Cobertura, and manually inspecting the HTML reports (or alternately I should just try the Eclipse plugins for those projects).

The Big Faceless Organization has released the Big Faceless PDF Library 2.6.1, a $700 payware (more if you want support) Java class library for creating PDF documents. The $1300 Extended Edition adds the AcroForms support, digital signatures, and the ability to import and edit and existing PDF documents. Version 2.6.1 can now preflight PDFs.