tmtbox media

Genuitec is proud to announce the immediate availability of two milestone releases: MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 6.5 M1 and MyEclipse 6.5 Blue Edition M1. These releases, available in the “development releases” area of the download page, add features and functionality, as well as a peek at what to expect from the general availability release in the coming weeks.

Download now!

For MyEclipse:

Users will notice multiple such enhancements, such as the upgrade of MyEclipse Spring tools, which provides the most up-to-date technology as well as the integration of the latest Spring framework 2.5 libraries. JSF developers can expect to see a dramatic improvement to the JSF/Facelet visual page designer with all new support for coding and WYSIWYG preview of custom components. Finally, by customer demand, MyEclipse 6.5 includes Java portlet support. The new portlet creation tools seamlessly integrate with the MyEclipse visual web design tools and application server connectors to provide a rapid portlet development experience.

“We recognize that our customers expect the very highest service from the MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench product line,” said Wayne Parrott, vice president of development for Genuitec in a statement to the press. “With the MyEclipse 6.5 release, we continue our tradition of providing the Java enterprise developer community with the most recent application technologies and productivity tools available.”

Read more here

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.1.1!

Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

JRuby 1.1.1 is the first point release of JRuby 1.1.  The fixes in this
release are primarily obvious compatibility problems and performance
enhancements.  Our goal is to put out point releases more frequently for
the next several months (about 3-4 weeks a release).  We want a more
rapid release cycle to better address issues brought up by users of JRuby.

Read more here

The AppFuse Team is pleased to announce the release of AppFuse 2.0.2. This release includes upgrades to Spring Security 2.0, jMock 2.4, the ability to customize code generation templates and many bug fixes.

For information on upgrading from 2.0.1, see the Release Notes or changelog. AppFuse 2.0.2 is available as a Maven archetype. For information on creating a new project using AppFuse, please see the QuickStart Guide or the demos and videos.

Read more in http://appfuse.org/

Lucene 2.3.1 contains fixes for serious bugs in 2.3.0

Please upgrade to 2.3.1 if you are currently using 2.3.0 to prevent index corruptions.

Binary and source distributions are available here.

Bugfixes

1. LUCENE-1168: Fixed corruption cases when autoCommit=false and
documents have mixed term vectors (Suresh Guvvala via Mike
McCandless).

2. LUCENE-1171: Fixed some cases where OOM errors could cause
deadlock in IndexWriter (Mike McCandless).

3. LUCENE-1173: Fixed corruption case when autoCommit=false and bulk
merging of stored fields is used (Yonik via Mike McCandless).

4. LUCENE-1163: Fixed bug in CharArraySet.contains(char[] buffer, int
offset, int len) that was ignoring offset and thus giving the
wrong answer.  (Thomas Peuss via Mike McCandless)

5. LUCENE-1177: Fix rare case where IndexWriter.optimize might do too
many merges at the end.  (Mike McCandless)

6. LUCENE-1176: Fix corruption case when documents with no term
vector fields are added before documents with term vector fields.
(Mike McCandless)

7. LUCENE-1179: Fixed assert statement that was incorrectly
preventing Fields with empty-string field name from working.
(Sergey Kabashnyuk via Mike McCandless)

This new release features:

• a redesign of the “second level cache” SPI
• a new integration with JBossCache 2.x taking full advantage of this new SPI (special thanks to Brian Stansberry for his help and hard work on this)
• introduction of the org.hibernate.jdbc.Work API for performing JDBC work without interfering with connection release modes

Read more http://www.hibernate.org/

Change in Scoping Rules for Wildcard Placeholders in Types
A wildcard in a type now binds to the closest enclosing type application.
For example List[List[_]] is now equivalent to the existential type
List[List[t] forSome { type t }]In version 2.7.0, the type expanded instead to
List[List[t]] forSome { type t }The new convention corresponds exactly to the way wildcards in Java are interpreted.

No Contractiveness Requirement for Implicits
The contractiveness requirement for implicit method definitions has been dropped. Instead it is checked for each implicit expansion individually that the expansion does not result in a cycle or a tree of infinitely growing types.

Read more http://www.scala-lang.org/index.html

Alexa ranking system which is generally counted to be wrong by several webmasters have changed their ranking system with improved methodology and now the traffic is tracked from several different sources which may be toolbars installed on user’s computers.

Here are some of the biggest changes i have seen :

Shoemoney.com : Was 2xxx Rank : Now 19818 Rank
Problogger : Was 3xxx Rank : Now 12917 Rank
JohnChow : Was 5xxx Rank : Now 17088 Rank
DigitalPoint : Was 3xxRank : Now 938 Rank
Global Internet Index : Was 66000 Rank : Now 45323 Rank
JimKarter : Was 40xxxRank : Now 187845 Rank
AmitBhawani : Was 70000Rank : Now 54006 Rank
Labnol : Was 19000 Rank : Now 14626 Rank

This clearly shows that Alexa previously used to track down websites based on webmaster’s traffic and give webmaster related websites a better rank but now it seems to be perfectly tracking everything.

Here is some info from Alexa Announcement page

When Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 it was with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community. We generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Since that time we’ve been delighted to see that the Alexa Rankings have become a yardstick by which website popularity is measured. We are grateful to the thousands of people who come to Alexa.com each day to check the Alexa Rankings.

In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest. Ask and you shall receive!

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.
My site’s ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?
Will you change the rankings again?
I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

Did you gain/lose any rankings in Alexa?

[via amitbhawani.com]

What’s New in 6.1

NetBeans IDE 6.1 is a significant update to NetBeans IDE 6.0 and includes the following changes:

* JavaScript support.
* Spring Framework Support.
* New MySQL support in Database Explorer. This feature allows you to register a MySQL Server, view databases, view, create, and delete databases, easily create and open connections to these databases, and to launch the administration tool for MySQL. This also allows you to easily create NetBeans sample databases so that following tutorials, blogs, and so on is significantly easier.
* Support for Java Beans. You can now view Java Bean patterns in the Navigator and BeanInfo Editor.
* JSF CRUD Generator. With this feature, you can generate a JavaServer Faces CRUD application from JPA entity classes.
* Javadoc Code Completion. Editing of javadoc comments is more convenient with code completion.
* Shareability of projects. This new feature in Java SE, Java Web, and all Java EE project types allows you to create projects that share definitions of libraries. That in turn allows you to create self-contained projects or sets of projects that can easily be built from the command line, on continuous integration servers, and by users of other IDEs without problems.
* Existing infrastructure has been enhanced to support window transparency (on platforms that provide it).
* Javadoc and sources association. Now any JAR item on the project classpath can be associated with its Javadoc and sources too.
* Inspect Members and Hierarchy Windows. Inspect Members and Hierarchy actions now work when the caret in the Java Editor is on a Java class for which there is no source available.
* On Demand Binding Attribute for Visual Web JSF projects.
* Axis2 support for web services.
* SOAP UI integration for Web Service testing and monitoring.
* The integration of the December 2007 through March 2008 bug fixes listed on the following page: http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeans6.0PatchesInfo.

For information about the main development features in NetBeans IDE, see the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Information page.
Supported Technologies

NetBeans IDE 6.1 supports the following technologies and has been tested with the following application servers. If you plan to use versions of JBoss, WebLogic, or Struts other than those explicitly listed, please note that you may encounter unpredictable IDE behavior as a result of the technologies being external interfaces which the project team has little or no control over.

Supported technologies:

* Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0
* JAX-WS 2.1
* Java Persistence (JSR-220)
* JavaServer Faces 1.2 (JSR-127)
* Java Servlet 2.5
* JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.1

* Struts 1.2.9
* Java API for XML-based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC) 1.6
* Java APIs for XML Registries (JAXR) 1.0
* Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.4
* Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB) 2.1
* JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) 1.1

Tested application servers:

* Sun Java System Application Server 9.0 (GlassFish V1)
* Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 (GlassFish V2)
* Sun Java System Application Server PE 8.2
* Tomcat 5.5
* Tomcat 6.0
* JBoss 4.0.4
* WebSphere 6.0
* Websphere 6.1
* WebLogic 9.2
* WebLogic 10

Note: If you are using the GlassFish application server, it is recommended that you run GlassFish V2 in order to work with NetBeans IDE 6.1.

Read more http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/61/relnotes.html

While on a visit in Romania, where Bill Gates participated in the celebration of 10 years since the Microsoft branch has been running there, and the launch of Vista, Microsoft’s president declared that, with the right amount of administration, the new Vista could run life support systems in hospitals. Here is a fragment from the interview:

Journalist: Let’s imagine a hospital where life support systems are running Vista. Would you trust it with your life?
Bill Gates: Security has been the top priority for Microsoft for quite some time and that’s why I put out a key call for us to focus on that in a very big way over three years ago, and that’s why we’ve made investments like having people from Gecad ( Romanian company ) join on the security action from Microsoft. The answer to your question is that, absolutely, Vista is the most secure operating system we’ve ever done, and if it’s administred properly, absolutely, it can be used to run a hospital or any kind of mission crytical thing. But it’s not as simple as saying “If you use Vista, that happens automatically”. The issues about patient records and who should be able to see them, the issue about setting up a network, so that authorized people can connect up to that hospital network, the issue about having backup power, so that the computer systems can run even if the generators go down. There are a lot of issues to properly set up that system, so that you have the redundancy and the security walls to make sure it fullfils that very crytical function. So we are working with partners to raise their skills to make sure that when get involved in an installation like that they can make it secure. So I feel better about Vista than any other operating system, but there’s a lot of things that need to be done well, and we’re certaintly committed to step up and make sure these security issues are ieasier and better understood.
This could be the truth or it could be one man’s opinion. You can download the above segment of the interview here. (Big thanks to Alex Radescu for the recording)

But the real question that I must ask is this: Would YOU put your life in Vista’s hands? Do you trust it enough?

This would really give a new meaning to the “Blue Screen of Death“