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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rob Oxspring Contents -------- General Ant Commons Jetspeed Lucene 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?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&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?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&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 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-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. 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?[EMAIL PROTECTED]&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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
