Java News from Friday, January 6, 2006

The XNap Commons project has posted Gettext Commons 0.9, a Java binding for GNU gettext. "The lightweight Gettext Commons library combines the power of the Unix-style GNU gettext tools with the widely used Java ResourceBundles. We find that the usual Java i18n approach of using custom property keys rather than the original text is cumbersome to use and makes programs harder to read. All user visible text is replaced by arbitrary keys complicating lookups of strings in the source." This is published under the LGPL.

The Jakarta Apache Project has released version 5.5.15 of the Tomcat open source servlet container and official reference implementation of the Java Servlet API 2.4 and Java Server Pages (JSP) 2.0. "Tomcat 5.5 is designed to run on J2SE 5.0 and later, and requires configuration to run on J2SE 1.4....In addition, Tomcat 5.5 uses the Eclipse JDT Java compiler for compiling JSP pages. This means you no longer need to have the complete Java Development Kit (JDK) to run Tomcat, but a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is sufficient. The Eclipse JDT Java compiler is bundled with the binary Tomcat distributions. Tomcat can also be configured to use the compiler from the JDK to compile JSPs, or any other Java compiler supported by Apache Ant." 5.5.15 is a bug fix release, but is only considered beta quality; i.e. not ready for production.

BlueJ 2.1.1, a free integrated development environment (IDE) for Java aimed at education, has been released. 2.1.1 iosa bug fix release.