[DRAFT1] Jakarta Newsletter - November 2002

[Rob Oxspring <ro...@apache.org>]

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
Commons


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=f
alse
[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



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-validator/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.



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Re: Jakarta Newsletter - November 2002

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

OK, I'll give it a try:

Ant
===

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]


Footnotes: 
[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>


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Re: [DRAFT1] Jakarta Newsletter - November 2002

[James Strachan <ja...@yahoo.co.uk>]

From: "Jeff Martin" <je...@custommonkey.org>
> Don't suppose you'd consider putting a link to XMLUnit
> http://xmlunit.sf.net/ in the Jelly section. It's always good to try a
> bit of shameless publicity seeking ;-)

Its pretty well hidden, but there is a link in the Jelly tag reference...

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/jelly/tags.html#jelly:xmlunit

as well as in the javadoc

http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/jelly/apidocs/org/apache/commons/j
elly/tags/xmlunit/package-summary.html

so there is at least some XMLUnit publicity there :-)

James
-------
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/

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Re: [DRAFT1] Jakarta Newsletter - November 2002

[Jeff Martin <je...@custommonkey.org>]

Don't suppose you'd consider putting a link to XMLUnit
http://xmlunit.sf.net/ in the Jelly section. It's always good to try a
bit of shameless publicity seeking ;-)
-- 
Jeff Martin

Memetic Engineer

http://www.custommonkey.org/ 


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