February, 2009 Java News

Friday, February 27, 2009 (Permalink)

Subversion 1.5.6, an open source version control system designed to replace CVS, has been released. Changes seem like minor cleanups around edge conditions such as "make it impossible to add .svn to wc via 'svn add --parents'" and "allow commits over Neon of files >2GB (POSIX only)".

Thursday, February 26, 2009 (Permalink)

From the "Why didn't I know about this sooner department?" Jailer is an open source tool "for database subsetting, schema browsing, and rendering. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML."

Monday, February 23, 2009 (Permalink)

Bare Bones Software has released version 9.1.1 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 is a bug fix release. New copies cost $125. Upgrades from 9.0 are free. Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.

Friday, February 20, 2009 (Permalink)

The Apache Software Foundation has released version 2.0.10 Maven, their open source build tool and dependency manager. This is a bug fix release.

Thursday, February 19, 2009 (Permalink)

The Big Faceless Organization has released the Big Faceless PDF Library 2.11.3. This seems to mostly be a bug fix release. The library costs $850 (more if you want support).

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 (Permalink)

Nathan Funk has released JEP 3.3. a free-as-in-speech (GPL) Java library for parsing and evaluating mathematical expressions. Version 3.3 adds Switch, Case, Left, Right, Mid, Substring, LowerCase, UpperCase, Length, and Trim functions.

Monday, February 16, 2009 (Permalink)

Apple has posted Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 3 that "delivers improvements to the security and compatibility of Java on Mac OS X 10.5.6 and later." The security fixes in this one are pretty important. Without it an applet can pretty easily escape the sandbox. All users should upgrade. Check Software Update.

Friday, February 13, 2009 (Permalink)

Registration is open for JavaOne which is a little late this year: June 2-5 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I'm not planning on going this year, but you never know.

Thursday, February 12, 2009 (Permalink)

JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 8.1. New features include support for Git version control and the Oracle dialect of SQL. It's also supposed to be much faster. IDEA is $599 payware (up from $499). Upgrades from 7.x or earlier are $299. At my day job, I'm mostly using Eclipse 3.4 lately, though I do occasionally switch out to IDEA for very large refactorings across tens of thousands of classes that Eclipse can't handle and IDEA can (barely).

Wednesday, February 11, 2009 (Permalink)

Catalysts GmbH has released AsDoclet 1.2.0, a JavaDoc docldt that generates Actionscript and C# files out of Java sources. "Such a tool is essentially useful for RIA and Client/Server applications where value objects are transmitted between server and client as serialized data that should be deserializable on both ends again. That includes remoting technologies like Flash Remoting, RTMP, Blaze DS, Red5, and Hessian." Neat trick if it works. AsDoclet is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 (Permalink)

Kirill Grouchnikov released the Flamingo component suite 4.0, an open source (BSD license) "Swing implementation of the Office 2007 ribbon container and related components. The components have consistent visuals under the existing core and third-party look-and-feels, respect the DPI settings of the user desktop and follow the core Swing guidelines in the external APIs and the internal implementation details." Version 4.0 adds an application menu, title bar, key tips, rich tooltips, and more. Java 6 or later is required.

Thursday, February 5, 2009 (Permalink)

The Apache Project has released Qpid M4, an open source, "cross platform enterprise messaging solution which implements the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (http://www.amqp.org). It provides brokers written in Java and C++ and clients in C++, Java (including a JMS implementation), .Net, Python, and Ruby."

A couple of years ago when I was working on a now defunct search engine, we were using ActiveMQ to pass messages between the frontend and the backend. The system was unreliable, flaky, and hard to debug. It delivered exactly none of the reliability queues promised. In fact, quite the opposite. We eventually ripped it out and replaced it with straight HTTP which didn't promise reliability, but had the distinct adavntage of actually working. At the time I thought the problem was in the open source queue library we were using. I thought only big, expensive queue products for big iron actually worked; but that was before I started to talking to developers using those products and learned that the commercial queue servers were just as buggy, incomprehensible, unreliable, and failure prone as the open souce products we were using. The only difference was we were using our buggy, open source library for a startup that barely made w whimper when it shut down; and they were using their expensive, six-figure closed source products to run national banks and the like. However, their systems didn't actually work any better than ours did, which made me more than a little nervous about certain European economies.

Perhaps QPid is actually the first such product that will actually do what it promises. More likely there's something wrong with the whole design of network systems based on message queues, and we need to start developing alternatives.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 (Permalink)

The Eclipse Project has posted the fifth milestone of Eclipse 3.5 Galileo, their open integrated development environment for Java. Version 3.5 adds numerous small new features though overall it's beginngin to look like more and more of a configuration nightmare. At some point Eclipse, desperately needs a user interface overhaul. Adding new switches for every conceivable customization is not a scalable approach in the long term. Enabling users to "Customize menus and toolbars" is not a substitute for an organized, logical menu structure on first launch. In any case, new features since 3.4 include:

  • Mac OS X Cocoa support for SWT
  • Links in StyledText
  • Block selection mode in text editors
  • Many OSGI improvements
  • Constructor completion
  • Improved Java-to-JavaScript and vice versa in the SWT Browser widget
  • New caret listener
  • The Java code formatter can preserve user line breaks by not joining lines in code or comments.
  • Links in Javadoc headers
  • Various bundled libraries are upgraded including JUnit 4.5, Jetty 6.1, and ICU4J.
  • Cairo on AIX
  • Apply patch in the Synchronize view
  • The Javadoc view and hovers now support the {@inheritDoc} tag and add links to overridden methods
  • Comparing identical values is now detected by the compiler and reported as a warning.

Nice enough, but what I really want from Eclipse right now is the ability to load and refactor tens of thousands of classes in one project.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 (Permalink)

JetBrains has released IntelliJ IDEA 8.0.1. This seems to fix a hundred assorted bugs. IDEA is $599 payware (up from $499). Upgrades are $299. At my day job, I'm mostly using Eclipse 3.4 lately, though I do occasionally switch out to IDEA for very large refactorings across tens of thousands of classes that Eclipse can't handle and IDEA can (barely).

Monday, February 2, 2009 (Permalink)

Version 1.9.1 of Ruby has been released. This is the first stable release of the Ruby 1.9 series. According to Yuki Sonoda, 1.9.1 "is modern, faster, with clearer syntax, multilingualized and much improved version of Ruby." Version 1.8.x is still maintained; the syntax doesn't appear completely compatible with 1.8; and many third party packages have not been upgraded yet, so unless you're maintaining one of those, you should probably hold off on upgrading for a while.

Sunday, February 1, 2009 (Permalink)

The Gnu Project has released version 4.3.3 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 1.5 level with some omissions. Accoprding to Richard Guenther, "GCC 4.3.3 is a bug-fix release containing fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 4.3.2."


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elharo@metalab.unc.edu