Cafe au Lait Java News and ResourcesAll of these mistakes notwithstanding, one should not overlook the success of X as free software. X predates version 1 of the GPL by some five years. Once the GPL came out, Richard Stallman was a regular visitor to the X Consortium's offices; he would ask, in that persistent way he has, for X to change licenses. That was not an option, though; the X Consortium was supported by a group of corporations which was entirely happy with the MIT license. But in retrospect, Keith says, "Richard was right."
X was an industry-supported project, open to "anybody but Sun." Sun's domination of the workstation market at that time was daunting to vendors; they thought that, if they could displace SunView with an industry-standard alternative, they would have an easier time breaking into that market. Jim Gettys sold this idea, nearly single-handedly, to Digital Equipment Corporation; it is, arguably, the first attempt to take over an existing market with free software. It worked: those vendors destroyed Sun's lock on the market - and, perhaps, Keith noted, the Unix workstation market as a whole.
There were problems, needless to say. The MIT license discourages sharing of code, so every vendor took the X code and created its own, closed fork. No patches ever came back to the free version of X from those vendors. Beyond that, while the implementation of X11 was done mainly at DEC, the maintenance of the code was assigned to the X Consortium at MIT. At that point, Keith said, all innovation on X simply stopped. Projects which came out of the X Consortium in these days were invariably absolute failures: XIE, PEX, XIM, XCMS, etc. There began the long, dark period in which X essentially stagnated.
--Jonathan Corbet
Read the rest in 25 Years of X
Mort Bay Consulting has released Jetty 6.1.22, an open source servlet engine that supports version 2.5 of the Java Servlet API and version 2.1 of Java Server Pages, and my personal favorite embeddable web server. According to Grge Wilkins,
This release contains a work around for the vulnerability in the SSL protocol that is documented in CVE-2009-3555. The work around prevents renegotiation of SSL connections and this prevents man in the middle text injection. This work around may affect some client certificate usage and for that, an updated JVM will be required.
Another security related fix is that the log is now filtered for control characters to protect against vulnerable xterms.
It is highly recommended that all jetty 6 servers are updated to use 6.1.22.
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JetBrains has released YouTrack 1.0 a $1200 payware web-based "keyboard-centric bug and issue tracking tool". I'm afraid they've made a major design blunder with this product, although perhaps it's recoverable. Keyboard-centricity was a crutch for 30 year-old green screen applications like Emacs for computers that didn't have the horsepower to provide real menus and a discoverable UI. And even in those environments keyboard interfaces only really worked for folks who spent every day, 9-5 in that one application; but no one spends their entire workday inside a bug tracker. No one's going to want to memorize all the keyboard commands for this. For instance, would you rather click a button marked "Close Issue" or type fixed, and then press Ctrl+Enter? And just what are you supposed to do on a keyboard with neither Ctrl nor Enter keys? We've known for decades that "see and choose" beats "remember and type" every time. It's sad to see JetBrains never got the memo.
JetBrains has posted the first beta of IntelliJ IDEA 9.0 (and here I haven't even gotten around to trying IDEA 8.0 yet). New features include:
@Nonnull
Bare Bones Software has released version 9.3 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac, my favorite XML editor on any platforms, what I'm using to type these very words.
This release fixes bugs and adds a new bbfind command line tool. On the downside, it makes an annoying and incorrect though not crippling change in handling UTF-8 encoded documents. UTF-8 with a byte-order mark is not a different encoding than UTF-8 without. I'll have to report the bug. The BBEdit developers have never really quite understood character sets and encodings, I'm afraid. They're 99% of the way there, but the 1% keeps itching from release to release.
Despite that minor quibble, I really, really wish BBEdit were available on Linux, and a Windows port wouldn't be unwelcome either.
One of my co-workers turned me onto kate recently, and it's a little better than gEdit, even if it does insist on dirtying my X-term with pointless log messages; but it's still no BBEdit or TextMate.
New copies cost $125. Upgrades from 9.x are free.
Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.
ej-technologies GmbH has released version 6.0 of
JProfiler,
a $698 payware profiler
based on the Java virtual machine profiling interface (JVMPI
that can report on CPU usage, memory size, threads, and "VM telemetry"
(whatever that is).
New features in this release include "reworked thread profiling, a new method statistics view, exceptional method runs, tree maps, auto-tuning", and support for FreeBSD x86 and Linux PPC.
Upgrades are $179.
JBoss has posted the second release candidate of Hibernate 3.5, an open source (LGPL) object relational mapping system for Java. New features in 3.5 include:
Notably absent from this list (though I hope they just forgot to mention it) is generic type safety. Does anyone have any ideas how to keep Hibernate (especially HIbernate 3.1) from filling my IDE with unchecked cast and other generics warnings?
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