Welcome to the Java Tools community

Welcome to Java Tools Community, a gathering place for those interested in Java™ Development Tools. Here you'll find news, articles, discussions, great open source tools and all the help you'll need to start up your project.

Project args4j Graduated!
Args4J is a small Java class library that makes it easy to parse command line options/arguments in your application. This project released its first version and was graduated out of the incubator.

Easier tools or easier frameworks?
In a recent interview, Bob Brewin, Sun's Chief Architect for Developer Tools, claimed that "We are rapidly approaching the point -- if we are not there already -- where applications are too complex for a classic IDE, much less the developer, to comprehend." He speaks specifically about NetBeans and Sun's Java Studio familly of products. Are we seeing a comeback of higher level, case like IDEs? What about you? Are you using code editting IDEs or more higher level ones? Do you strongly prefer one type over the other? Do you want easier frameworks or easier tools? Read more
  (May 25, 2005)

Java sets sail for the final frontier
Programming language will shine on the edge of the network, says Java creator James Gosling.

Java Web services spec gets new name
JAX-RPC 2.0, a planned upgrade to a Java specification for use in Web services and remote procedure calls in Java, is getting a name change to JAX-WS, Sun Microsystems acknowledged on Wednesday.

In Brief: Mainsoft ships Visual MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition
Cross-platform development company Mainsoft has announced the availability of Visual MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition. Also known as Grasshopper, the Visual Studio .Net plug-in lets Visual Studio developers quickly develop Web applications for Linux . The plug-in, technical articles, and community forums are available at no charge to developers who register at http://dev.mainsoft.com. Mainsoft also announced it is extending its collaboration with the Mono open-source development community to enable Visual Studio .Net developers to contribute enhancements, class libraries, and fixes to Grasshopper's and Mono's shared open source runtime.

Subversion 1.2
The Subversion version control system development team has released version 1.2. The new package includes optional locking, full WebDAV autoversioning, fater access to old revisions, many improved APIs, bug fixes and more. "Subversion 1.2 is a superset of all previous Subversion releases. Anything in 1.0.x and 1.1.x is also in 1.2, but 1.2 contains features and bugfixes not present in any earlier release." A detailed changelog is available.

Pebble 1.8
Simon Brown has announced the release of version 1.8 of 'blogging application Pebble. "I'm pleased to announce that Pebble 1.8 is now available for download from here. This release contains a few minor bug fixes but the majority of the work has been around internationalization and translations of the public facing text now allow a consistent user experience in a single language." It now supports 14 languages.

Xrefactory 2.0.7
The Xrefactory project, a code completion and refactoring addon for jEdit, XEmacs, and Emacs, has released version 2.0.7 to fix some bugs for developers working on 64-bit architectures.

JBother 0.8.7 - Groovy Based Jabber Client
Groovy based Jabber client JBother has released version 0.8.7 with some minor feature enhancements. "Partial file transfer support, jabber:iq:last and jabber:iq:search support, and many UI improvements."

GeoTools 2.1.M5
The Geotools project has announced that version 2.1.M5 is available for download. They write in, "This release us a little closer to 2.1.0. The successful RnD work has been on: speed improvements in lite renderer, improvements to label rendering, and the return of raster support. Thanks this time go out to Jesse, David and those working on GridCoverage. The release is made in conjunction with GeoServer 1.3.0-beta4."

Is Harmony creating Java dis-harmony?
Since the Apache Project announced its Harmony project to build an open source implementation of J2SE, there have been piles of posting, blogs, emails, and interviews – both pro and con.

UDIG 1.0.RC5
The UDIG project, a desktop GIS built on the Eclipse RCP and GeoTools, is rapidly approaching 1.0 with a series of release candidates. The latest being RC5. The project writes in, "The RC5 release represents a great increase inthe rendering of Shapefiles and better support for more data formats."

Ant 1.6.4
The Apache Ant development team has released version 1.6.4. It is a bug fix release focused on the javah task and directory scanning.

AtLeap 0.5 Beta 3 - CMS
Blandware has released AtLeap 0.5 Beta 3. They write in, "AtLeap 0.5 Beta 3 has many changes: added HTML mail templates with inline image inclusion, added bidirectional relationships between ContentFieldValues, Menu items and Resources and Pages in order to prevent broken links, tested under PostgreSQL and Oracle DBMS, added installation scripts for Resin3 and JBoss4, added online documentation, added site map, performance improvements, fixed bugs and added some other small features." AtLeap is a free Java multilingual CMS (Content Management System) with full-text search engine

blojsom 2.25
David Czarnecki has released version 2.25 of popular Java blogging client blojsom. "The initial thrust of this release was the new look and feel for the administration console. The previous look and feel sucked! The new look and feel is consistent across browsers, more eye pleasing, and more extensible. There are a number of plugins in this release to combat comment and trackback spam. If there are other methods outside of IP filtering (with whitelist and blacklist support as well as ranges), link spam detection, and spam phrase detection (with regular expression support) you think would be useful, let me know. The plugins available now are a start and they'll evolve for sure. I also introduced two new service 'integration' plugins."

Wicket 1.0rc3
The Wicket project has annouced the release of version 1.0 rc3 of their component based web application framework. "This release fixes a number of minor issues and has some additions concerning message handling and rendering. This is planned to be the last release candidate before 1.0, so if all goes well, expect a 1.0 final release within two week."

Visual Rules 3.0.2
Release 3.0.2 of Visual Rules is now available. They write in, "The new version 3.0.2 provides ant tasks to automate rule code generation and also new functions for string operations. The business rules engine "visual rules" - a tool for the graphical modeling of business logic – is fully integrated into Eclipse 3.0."

launch4j 2.0 beta1
The launch4j project, has released version 2.0 beta1 of their Java wrapper for creating Windows executables. "This is the first beta release of 2.0, not everything is finished yet and you may experience some problems. The header is an almost unchanged version of 1.4, so it should be quite stable. Right now I'm planning to test Launch4j on various platforms and fix potential issues. Later on I'd like to add version info, ant task and other features." It features a new wrapper to allow creating windows executables on Linux, new config file, and a Swing GUI.