Java News from Monday, August 7, 2006

Frank Cohen has released TestMaker 4.4, an "open-source utility and framework for testing Web applications, services, and SOA for scalability, performance and reliability."

The Apache Portal Project has released Portals Bridges 1.0, the open source reference implementation of the Java Portlet Specification. According to the announcement, "The Portals Bridges Project provides Portal independent and JSR-168 compliant Portlet components. The released set of components supports Portlet development using common web frameworks like Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl and Velocity. The Bridges were initially developed by the Jetspeed-2 Team and is actively used by Jetspeed-2 itself. Several other Portals are already adopting and providing support for Bridges too like Apache Cocoon Portal, JBoss Portal, GridSphere Portal and Stringbeans Portal."

The Apache Jakarta Project has released JMeter 2.2 (a.k.a. 2.1.2 in the release notes), an open source (Apache 2.0 license) load testing application written in Java. "Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Data Bases and Queries, FTP Servers and more). It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server, network or object to test its strength or to analyze overall performance under different load types. You can use it to make a graphical analysis of performance or to test your server/script/object behavior under heavy concurrent load."

Steve Roy has posted Jaree 1.1d6, a free-as-in-beer utility "that wraps a user interface around the jar and javap tools to let you see the contents of Java JAR files. It shows you the hierarchical contents of the packages, and double-clicking on a class shows you its members and methods. These can be copied to the clipboard, and one nicety is that you can also copy their internal type signatures which is useful when writing JNI code."