Java News from Thursday, March 29, 2007

The Free Software Foundation has released the third draft of the GNU General Public License version 3.

Changes in this draft include:

Unbelievably all explanatory documents are PDFs. I thought the FSF had a clue, but there really doesn't seem to be any HTML. Usually when this happens, I want to go over to the publisher's office and delete every copy of Microsoft Word from their systems. In this case, though, I expect what we'd really need to do is hack in and delete LaTeX instead. Probably wouldn't work, though. They probably have it all backed up in Subversion.

When are publishers going to get a clue? Authoring tool preference is not an excuse for annoying users with PDF. If you're going to publish on the Web, use a format designed for the Web. that's HTML, not PDF. If your authoring tool doesn't support HTML, buy a better tool. (The FSF can build one instead if they like.)

And to everyone who writes in every time I say this to explain that they really want to download the file and waste a lot of paper and toner printing it out so they can read it at the beach, please remember. We're talking about reading documents on the Web, not at the beach or on airplanes. Thank you.


Robert G. McCue has released HtmlRipper 2.1.5, "a Java package that contains routines that enable dynamic data to be extracted from Web pages, HTML documents, using pre-defined rule sets. These routines allow you to dynamically create web pages for viewing that contain only the data you are interested in from your favorite web sites without all the annoying 'noise' that surrounds them. Multiple data sets can be combined into a single dynamic web page. The HtmlRipper software is ideal for the creation of data mining, page analysis, web page filtering and article clipping / ripping software especially for the creation of data pages for WAP display." HTML Ripper is published under the LGPL.


Kent Beck and David Saff have released JUnit 4.3.1. This is a bug fix release for a couple of regressions that snuck into 4.3. (I guess there test suite wasn't comprehensive enough. How ironic.) Java 5 is required.


Jose Solorzano has released pBeans 2.0.1, yet another library for storing Java objects in SQL databases. The tables and databse schemas are automatically created from the beans. Supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL Server. pBeans is published under the Apache 2.0 license.


DeNova, Inc. has released JExpress Professional 7.0.6, a $499 payware cross-platform installer builder for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris.


Websina has released BugZero 4.5.3, a $1299 payware (+$300 for maintenance) Web-based bug tracking system that supports multiple projects, group-based access, automatic bug assignment, file attachment, email notification, and metric reports. Bug Zero is written in Java and can run on top of various backend databases including MySQL. 4.5.3 makes some small UI improvements.


Diomidis Spinellis has released UMLGraph 4.7, an open source (BSD license) tool for declaratively specifying UML diagrams. UMLGraph uses text files that look vaguely like source code to specify how UML class and sequence diagrams are drawn. A doclet converts this into a Graphviz diagram that can be easily converted to Postscript, GIF, SVG, JPEG, etc. Version 4.7 is a bug fix release. Java 5 is required.


Enterprise Distributed Technologies has released edtFTPj/Pro 1.4.0, a $299 payware FTP library for Java that supports FTP over SSL. Version 1.4.0 adds FTPInputStream and FTPOutputStream classes and fixes bugs.