One more question about JSR-311: why is this being proposed for Java Standard Edition at all? The proposal seems to depend on JAX-WS and the Java Servlet API, neither of which is included in the Java 6 Standard Edition. Will these packages have to be added to Java SE just to support this?
The Gnu Project has released version 4.1.2 of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC contains frontends for C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Ada, and Java as well as libraries for these languages. GCC's Java is a clean room implementation that doesn't use any Sun code, so it doesn't always exactly match Sun release versions, but this is roughly at the Java 1.4 level with some omissions. According to Mark Mitchell, "This release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC 4.1.1. GCC 4.1.2 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features."
The Jakarta Apache Project has released Commons Lang 2.3, an open surce collection of "helper utilities for the java.lang API, notably String manipulation methods, basic numerical methods, object reflection, creation and serialization, and System properties. Additionally it contains an inheritable enum type, an exception structure that supports multiple types of nested-Exceptions, basic enhancements to java.util.Date and a series of utlities dedicated to help with building methods, such as hashCode, toString and equals." Classes include:
CharRangeCharSetCharSetUtilsCompareToBuilderEnumEnum.Entry EnumUtils EqualsBuilder ExceptionUtils HashCodeBuilder Nestable NestableDelegate NestableError NestableException NestableRuntimeException NumberRange NumberUtils ObjectUtils ObjectUtils.Null RandomStringUtils SerializationException SerializationUtils StandardToStringStyle StringUtils SystemUtils ToStringBuilder ToStringStyle ToStringStyle.DefaultToStringStyle ToStringStyle.MultiLineToStringStyle ToStringStyle.NoFieldNameToStringStyle ToStringStyle.SimpleToStringStyle ValuedEnum ArrayUtilsBitFieldBooleanUtilsCharRange (previously package scoped)ClassUtilsStringEscapeUtilsWordUtilsIllegalClassExceptionIncompleteArgumentExceptionNotImplementedExceptionNullArgumentExceptionSerializationExceptionUnhandledExceptionValidateIntRangeLongRangeRangeDoubleRangeJVMRandomNumberRangeFloatRangeNumberUtilsFractionRandomUtils DateFormatUtilsFastDateFormatDateUtilsStopWatchCompositeFormatStrBuilderStrLookupStrMatcherStrSubstitutorStrTokenizer"This release contains an equal number of bugfixes and improvements. Users of the StrBuilder and DurationFormatUtils classes will especially want to upgrade." There's a lot of good stuff here. Everyone should check it out, at least for the ideas even if you don't want to use the library.