Java News from Tuesday, April 11, 2006

KisKis - Keep It Secret! Keep It Safe! is free-as-in-speech (GPL) password manager written in Java. It's based on Swing, the Legion of the Bouncy castle's JCE implementation, and dom4j. (Ouch! Two out of three isn't bad.) It can import and export passwords in XML. This is a critical feature missing from too many competing products such as CiphSafe. Yes, I know this is a potential security problem. However, I don't think it's as a big a security hole as locking all the passwords into one program.


The Apache Software Foundation has released Maven 2.0.4, an open source build tool for Java that's more declarative and less procedural than Ant. This is mostly a bug fix release.


Mark Doliner has released Cobertura 1.8, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) code coverage tool for Java. Version 1.8 adds support for Groovy, can show the total number of lines and branches in the HTML report, and allows multiple JVMs to write to the same data file. If you're not already using another code coverage tool, this is definitely worth a look. Java 1.4 or later is required.


Websina has released BugZero 4.3.3, a $1299 payware (+$300 for maintenance) Web-based bug tracking system that supports multiple projects, group-based access, automatic bug assignment, file attachment, email notification, and metric reports. Bug Zero is written in Java and can run on top of various backend databases including MySQL. This release enables user accou7nts to be temporarily disabled.