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Posted to announcements@jakarta.apache.org by Rob Oxspring <ro...@apache.org> on 2002/12/12 18:31:54 UTC
Jakarta Newsletter - November 2002
Jakarta Newsletter
==================
Issue: 5
Date: November 2002
Url: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/news/200211.html
It has been a quiet month. Commons has killed on old component and
welcomed a new one, while other components have kept up fixes, features
and releases. Elsewhere there has been more discussion about the
infrastructure and community at Apache, and an attempt to be helpful to
those developers using IDEs
As always, I want to thank those who contributed and hope that you enjoy
the read. If you would like to comment further on any of the highlighted
discussions then please do so on the appropriate list, if you want to
comment on the newsletter itself then please point your comments to
general@jakarta.apache.org.
Rob Oxspring
Contents
--------
General
Ant
Commons
Jetspeed
Lucene
Turbine
General
=======
"Ideas, suggestions, and comments on the overall Jakarta project"
Editor: Rob Oxspring
Andrew Oliver decided to do something about the Java developers who "cut
their teeth" on IDEs and don't understand the intricacies of the command
line tools that are used under the hood. The page [1] was welcomed by
many and was rapidly expanded [2] and should hopefully be a resource
useful to a wide range of developers.
Duplicated or pointless import statements appear over time in most Java
code. This is an issue that Tom Copeland wanted to tackle, and sparked a
few iterations [3] of the "bad imports" report [4].
[1] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&from=281536&to=281536&count=39&by=thread&paged=false
[2] - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/idedevelopers.html
[3] -
http://archives.apache.org/eyebrowse/BrowseList?listName=general@jakarta
.apache.org&by=thread&from=271386
[4] - http://cvs.apache.org/~tcopeland/jakarta_bad_imports.htm
Ant
===
"Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool"
Editor: Stefan Bodewig, Conor MacNeill
The biggest news in Ant land is that Ant has been promoted to a
top-level project at the board meeting in November. Much of the
discussion on ant-dev has been centered around the proposed board
resolution, the formation of the initial PMC and similar issues during
the last months. [1,2,3]
While Ant is leaving the oversight of the Jakarta PMC with this move,
Ant's committers are not necessarily leaving the Jakarta community, many
of us will still be around and contribute where we see fit.
After the release of Ant 1.5.1 at the beginning of October, we've kept
on fixing smaller bugs in the 1.5 branch, so a 1.5.2 release is getting
more likely. At the same time, development in the HEAD branch is picking
up momentum again as we start adding new features and experiment with
some stuff. [4,5]
The Ant GUI, Antidote, is being revived and discussions are getting
underway on the Ant-dev mailing list. If anyone wants to get involved in
this project, they are most welcome
[1] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103658833500006&r=1&w=2
[2] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103702213600002&r=1&w=2
[3] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103778589600002&r=1&w=2
[4] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103834929300004&r=1&w=2
[5] - http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=103834425100001&r=1&w=2
Commons
=======
"creating and maintaining reusable Java components"
Editor: Henri Yandell
Releases
--------
November saw the release of two new projects from Jakarta Commons, and
the release of a bugfix for another project.
Commons Validator 1.0 was mentioned in the previous newsletter. It was
released on November 1st and is a validation framework from the Struts
people.
Commons CLI 1.0 was released on the 6th of November and is an API for
parsing command line arguments. It is the direct descendant of 3 older
argument parsing APIs and other APIs have affected it over mail list
discussions. This gives it a very high pedigree and makes it a great
choice for handling the command line.
Commons Lang 1.0.1 is the first bugfix release for the Lang project.
There are no new APIs or deprecated functionality, so all Commons Lang
users are advised to upgrade, although the bugfixes are not
earth-shattering.
[1] -
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-commons/release/commons-validat
or/v1.0/RELEASE-NOTES.txt
[2] -
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-commons/release/commons-cli/v1.
0/RELEASE-NOTES.txt
[3] -
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-commons/release/commons-lang/v1
.0.1/RELEASE-NOTES.txt
Gossip
------
November was quiet for Commons, as it was for all of Apache. Indeed, the
Commons mail list dropped by 35%.
The Patterns project in the Sandbox has been mothballed as its code is
to go into Commons Lang and Commons Util. Work has begun on moving the
BeanUtils reflection code over to Commons Lang and various BeanUtils
bugs were dealt with.
A new database utility project has been proposed with generic JDBC(tm)
utilities and lives under the name of 'DbUtils' in the sandbox and a
project named 'attributes' has been proposed to handle runtime metadata
attributes.
[1] - http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/attributes/
Jelly
-----
Editor: James Strachan
Here are the main changes that have happened recently on the Jelly
project...
XPath sorting now added to the XML library
<j:useBean> can now construct beans with constructor parameters
better reporting of JellyUnit failures, line numbers, expressions etc.
XMLUnit library added for unit testing of XML inside JellyUnit
So now JellyUnit can support the following XML unit testing constructs
XPath based assertions via <test:assert xpath="..."/>
schema validation via the jelly:validate library, testing XML against
DTDs, XML Schema, RelaxNG etc
comparing 2 documents for equality using the new XMLUnit library
performing XSLT on some XML and then then performing any of the above
parsing HTML via the Neko parser and treating it as XML in any of the
above
As well as Jexl based assertions, assertEquals and a new <assertThrown>
tag to test for exceptions being thrown in Jelly scripts.
Jetspeed
========
"an Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and XML"
Editor: David Sean Taylor
Jetspeed 1.4b2 will be released on December 9.
New Features
------------
This release is full of new features thanks in great part to a very
welcome new committer, Mark Orciuch. Here is a list of new features
implemented by Mark:
Parameter Presentation Styles - Data Entry Widgets including
Date/Calendar, ListBox, CheckBoxGroup, TextArea, Custom JSP, Custom
Velocity Portlet Preview Mode Portlet Usage Logging Password Expiration
Online Profile Import/Export Print Friendly Mode Filtering in User
Browser and Psml Browser
Documentation
-------------
Jetspeed 1.4b2 introduces a new set of documentation to more fully cover
the changes made to version 1.4. We have added the following documents:
New 100+ page Jestpeed Tutorial
JPortal Application Examples, accompanies the tutorial
Jetspeed Axis Integration Guide
New Registry Documentation
New Layout Documentation
New Client Media Documentation
Dependencies
------------
We updated as many Jars as we could to the latest versions without
breaking the dependencies. Most importantly, we are now again in sync
with the latest releases of:
Torque
Turbine
Commons
Hypersonic DB
Improved JSP Support
--------------------
Jetspeed JSP Tag library updated to support internationalization and
Jetspeed Links. JSP templating engine updated to operate like
Velocities, supporting the same media/language/country fallback
algorithm.
Client and Media Type Registries
--------------------------------
Two new registries have been added to better support new Media Types and
Client agents.
Jetspeed Security
-----------------
Further enhancements to security:
New LDAP Security Implementation from Ender Kilicoglu
Added "owner rule" to only allow access to the owner of a portal
resource Cleaned up security in default site Add Security to References
Misc
----
Allow Customization of Portlet Control per Portlet
New File Cache utility
CheckStyle added to build
Lucene
======
"a high-performance, full-featured text search engine"
Editor: Otis Gospodnetic
Lucene's scoring implementation was previously tightly integrated with
the rest of the API. Doug Cutting added a public, extensible scoring
API, which allows others to create their own scoring algorithm and plug
it into Lucene:
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=lucene-dev@jakarta.a
pache.org&msgId=532504
A document describing Lucene's index file formats has been added to
Lucene's web site:
http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/fileformats.html
Turbine
=======
"a servlet based framework that allows developers to quickly build
secure web applications"
Editor: Martin Poeschl
The Turbine Team released the final releases of Turbine 2.2 and Torque
3.0.
A list of changes can be found on the web-site
http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/turbine-2/changes.html
http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/torque/changes.html
The distributions are available at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-turbine/turbine-2/release/2.2/
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-turbine/torque/release/3.0/
http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-turbine/tdk/release/2.2/
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