Java News from Wednesday, November 8, 2006

The Eclipse Project has posted the third milestone of Eclipse 3.3, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It also doubles as a base platform for your own applications, an alternative to the AWT and Swing, and a powerful floor wax and dessert topping. New features in this release. mostly minor, include:


IBM developerWorks has published my latest article, Simple Xalan extension functions: Mixing Java with XSLT. Xalan can invoke almost any method in almost any Java class in the classpath. Taking advantage of this can improve performance, provide features like trigonometric functions that aren't available in XSLT, perform file I/O, talk to databases and network servers, or implement algorithms that are easy to write in Java but hard to write in XSLT. This article teaches the basics of invoking Java code from Xalan.