Java News from Sunday, March 4, 2007

Jon S. Stevens has released SubEtha SMTP 1.2, a Java library that "provides a receptive SMTP server component. By plugging this component into your Java application, you can easily receive SMTP mail using a simple abstract Java interface."


Andrey Kusnetsov has released Imagero Reader 1.9.5_04 , a $3,399.96 payware image I/O library. "Supported file types include BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG, JNG, MNG, JPEG (including CMYK and 12-bit grey), PSD, PBM, PGM, PPM, TGA, EPS, EPSI, and EPSF, MRW, CRW, NEF, DCR, and DNG. It can read thumbnails and can read and edit metadata (IPTC, EXIF, XMP, Wang Annotations, Image Resource Blocks, Image File Directrories, JPEG Markers). An image can be read into an array, Image, BufferedImage, or tiled RenderedImage. Accurate color conversion is done with ICC profiles. TIFF tools allow you to split and merge TIFF images."


Steve Souza has released the Java Application Monitor 2.3 (JAMon), an open source (BSD license) thread safe API for monitoring production applications. JAMon can be used to determine application performance bottlenecks, user/application interactions, and application scalability. JAMon gathers summary statistics such as hits, execution times (total, average, minimum, maximum, standard deviation), and simultaneous application requests. JAMon statistics are displayed in the sortable JAMon report. This is a bug fix release.


Eric Lafortune has released ProGuard 3.8, an open source Java "class file shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator. It can detect and remove unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It can then optimize bytecode and remove unused instructions. Finally, it can rename the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. The resulting jars are smaller and harder to reverse-engineer." Version 3.8 fixes bugs. Proguard is published under the GPL.


Larry Ogrodnek has released Sparklines for Java 1.1. "Sparklines are 'intense, simple, wordlike graphics.' They are detailed in Edward Tufte's latest book, Beautiful Evidence and also in his message board." Sparklines for Java contains Java and JSTL libraries for drawing sparklines. This release no longer requires data URI support.


Sebastiano Vigna has released version 5.0.8 of fastUtil, a collection of type-specific Java maps and sets with a small memory footprint and faster access and insertion. The classes implement their standard counterpart interfaces such as java.util.Map and can be plugged into existing code. However, they also contain type-specific methods. For instance, the CharList class has not only the usual add(Object o) method but also an add(char c) method. This release streamlines the fast buffered stream classes. fastUtil is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).