Sunday, August 21, 2011

Episode 50

Unsupported Operation 50

Java

Jetbrains

Android

Apache

  • Apache JMeter 2.5
  • Tomcat 6.0.33 - a security and some bug fixes
  • Apache Maven 3.0.4 release imminent

Sonatype

Atlassian

Misc

 

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Episode 49

Unsupported Operation 49

Java

  • Java 7 Q&A
  • http://terrencebarr.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/lwuit-1-5-released/ - Light Weight User Interface Toolkit, good discussion/interview about the featues of the update on the latest Java Spotlight podcast.
  • Tattletale - Dependency discovery tool
  • Pulse CI Server 2.4
  • TorqueBox 1.1.1 - JRuby based AppServer built upon JBoss AS Server - updated to JRuby 1.6.3, improved support for Rails 3.1,

Jetbrains

  • IDEA 10.5.2 EAP 107.509 - The most important thing to note about this build is that Jetbrains finally tracked down the cause of the problem causing stale error markers to remain in the editor, and we hope that it has now been fixed. So please test and report.
  • Source of StarTeam plugin released - whats interesting about this is the mentioning of the Jetbrains Github account which houses a lot of tools, including the Clojure plugin, which is seeing updates/commits here - more so than the old repository I originally knew about. Youtrack-vcs-hooks project looks really interesting.

Apache

  • JSP files with dependencies in JARs are no longer recompiled on every access thereby improving performance.
  • Update to version 1.1.22 of the native component of the AJP and HTTP APR/native connectors.
  • Update to Commons Daemon 1.0.7.
  • Apache Commons Daemon 1.07 fixing below vulnerabilities
  • Apache Commons Daemon vulnerability - affects Tomcat 7.0 - 7.0.19, Tomcat 6.0.30 - 6.0.32, 5.5.32 - 5.5.33
    • Due to a bug in the capabilities code, jsvc (the service wrapper for
    • Linux that is part of the Commons Daemon project) does not drop
    • capabilities allowing the application to access files and directories
    • owned by superuser. This vulnerability only applies if:
    • a) Tomcat is running on a Linux operating system
    • b) jsvc was compiled with libcap
    • c) -user parameter is used
    • The Tomcat versions above shipped with source files for jsvc that included this vulnerability.

Atlassian

Android

  • Unlock with Wifi - disable your lockcode when connected to certain wifi networks.  handy.
  • Cling 1.0 - Java/Android UPnP library/tool stack for discovering, and uses UPnP devices/services.
  • Spirit HD - awesome addictive game

Other

  • Thoughtworks proves yet again its a bunch of tired has-been hacks with its Technology Radar. I suspect its “Radar” is pointing up  the arse of Martin Fowler to come up with this tosh.
  • coffeescript-maven-plugin 1.3 released - now expirimenting with native compilation support to .class files - why - I’m crazy mad :)
  • Mindmeister launched new site/app

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Episode 48

Unsupported Operation 48

Java

Apache

  • JCS (java caching) and BCEL moved to Apache Commons
  • Apache LDAP API 1.0-M6 released - this is their new client library
  • Apache Commons Compress 1.2, bug fixes, announcement of EOL for Java 1.4 with this release
  • Apache James jDKIM 0.2 - support for verification and signing for maillets
  • Apache HttpComponents HttpCore 4.1.3 GA released

Groovy

  • Gaelyk 1.0
  • Groovy with a static mode - I think  the chosen name is extremely rude and obnoxious
    • Not being statically typed is a connoisseurs criticism, and connoisseurs generally chase after things that are interesting rather than good”
    • “In my opinion there are three large barriers to Groovy adoption in the mainstream: performance, tooling, and bugs”
    • Jochen clarified saying the mode would be @StaticTyped or similar and would not provide anything other than compilation errors - no performance improvements. Much of the work is already done in Eclipse so it would be pulling that out.

Patent Talk

  • Microsoft reveals they invited Google to the consortium to buy the Novell patents - Google saw it as a trap (groklaw) as did everyone else.

 

Monday, August 1, 2011

Episode 47

Unsupported Operation 47

Java

  • Java 7 released - much faster startup time, but real buggy
    • Last month ago some new patches/tests were added to Apache Lucene which triggered/unveiled some serious bugs in Hotspots's loop optimization which is now enabled by default in JDK7.
    • Cay Horstman calls Java 7 unsafe at any speed.
    • Mark Reinhold told me there should be an update release soon with the fixes.  Oracle seems very good at update releases, usually one a month for security/critical fixes.
    • These problems were detected only 5 days before the official Java 7 release, so Oracle had no time to fix those bugs, affecting also many more applications. In response to our questions, they proposed to include the fixes into service release u2 (eventually into service release u1, see [http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/hotspot-compiler-dev/2011-July/005971.html]). This means you cannot use Lucene/Solr with Java 7 releases before Update 2! If you do, please don't open bug reports, it is not the committers' fault! At least disable loop optimizations using the -XX:-UseLoopPredicate JVM options
    • Java 7 paralyzes Lucene/Solr
    • Don’t use Java - are you kidding me? Putting things in perspective
    • Martin Clausen has put together a nice table/blog post outlining “Oracle Java 7 and ‘Commercial Features’” - listing what parts of the stack can, or cannot be freely installed.  Whilst the wording in the new license agreement has changed, and seems to have a few people up in arms, it doesn’t look that much different to Suns old license.  IANAL tho.
  • Java Magazine now available
  • Glassfish 3.3.1
  • Netbeans 7.0.1
  • OSCON Java 2011
  • Jitescript - fluent Java API for generating java classes on the fly - kinda scary code, but combine that with something like Parboiled PEG Parser/ANTLR and you could have something very powerful.
  • JBoss OSGi 1.0.0 released

Google

Apache

Sonatype / Maven

  • Jason van Zyl made a “maven” 3.0.4-SONATYPE distribution available including patches not yet pushed to upstream due to the Aether EPL licensing issue.  This is NOT an official Apache Maven release but does fix Richard’s dependency resolution issue, among other things.
  • New maven-release-plugin should be released soon which fixes the -SNAPSHOT tagging issue.

Scala

Misc