Java News from Sunday, May 7, 2006

The Legion of the Bouncy Castle has released version 1.33 of the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptography API, an open source, clean-room implementation of the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). It supports X.509 certificates, PKCS12, S/MIME, CMS, PKCS7, and lots of other juicy acronyms. It also includes its own light-weight crypto API that works in Java 1.0 and later, and does not depend on the JCE. Version 1.33 is a bug fix release. Download it while it's still legal.

Mantis 1.0.3, a free-as-in-speech (GPL) bug tracking system based on PHP and MySQL, has been released. This is a biug fix release.

The Jakarta Apache Project has released HTTPClient 3.0.1, an open source (Apache 2.0 license) HTTP 1.0/1.1 pure Java library for performing assorted HTTP operations. "Although the java.net package provides basic functionality for accessing resources via HTTP, it doesn't provide the full flexibility or functionality needed by many applications. The Jakarta Commons HttpClient component seeks to fill this void by providing an efficient, up-to-date, and feature-rich package implementing the client side of the most recent HTTP standards and recommendations." Features include:

• GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS, and TRACE
• HTTPS (HTTP over SSL)
• HTTP proxies
• Tunneled HTTPS connections through HTTP proxies, via the CONNECT method.
• Transparent connections through SOCKS proxies (version 4 & 5) using native Java socket support.
• Basic, Digest, encrypting NTLM (NT Lan Manager), and pluggable custom authentication
• Multi-Part form POST
• "Connection management support for use in multi-threaded applications. Supports setting the maximum total connections as well as the maximum connections per host. Detects and closes stale connections."
• Cookies
• KeepAlive in HTTP/1.0 and persistance in HTTP/1.1
• Connection timeouts

This is a bug fix release.