XHTMLTranscoder 1.0.005 - Initial Release   28 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Nicola Asuni has released the first public version of XHTMLTranscoder, an open-source Java class that quickly converts broken HTML code to well-formed XHTML. Nicola writes in, "This class extend the com.tecnick.htmlutils Java package that provides a collection of utilities to create, parse and convert HTML/XHTML documents. XHTMLTranscoder is a fast transcoder useful to convert HTML code in real-time. This class do not check headers, it checks only the general rules for tags, attributes and nesting: tags (elements) names in lowercase; attributes names in lowercase; elements nesting; elements termination; unquoted attributes; unminimized attributes; unterminated empty tags; preserve other languages elements (php, asp, jsp, ...). The HTML documents transcoded using the XHTMLTranscoder class are generally recognized as valid XHTML document by the W3C Markup Validation Service."

Twister 0.3 - Open Source WS-BPEL Engine   28 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Matthieu Riou has announced the release of version 0.3 of Twister, an Open Source Web Service orchestration engine following the WS-BPEL specifications. "Twister has just been released for the fourth time with version 0.3. Many fixes and improvements have been made on this release and Twister is now considered as production quality. Main changes include: WSDL and WS-BPEL validation, resources, WSDL and WS-BPEL deployed separately allowing more flexibility, improved the Worklist Manager to allow work items to be acquired before completion, detailed audit of executing process instances, improved the Flow implementation to allow parrallel process instantiation, better logging, and many bug fixes. Thanks a lot to everybody involved in this release!"

Drone IRC Bot 1.3   28 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Version 1.3 of Drone IRC Bot has been released. They write in, "The highlights of this release are: cleaner URLs in the public logging section and bugfixes related to correct handling of unknown encoding characters."

Seadragon 1.0 Beta - IM for Dolphins   28 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
The Leafy project has released their first beta 1.0 version of Seadragon, an application for emiting, recognizing, and emiting underwater signals. They write in, "Seadragon allows you to emit underwater whistles and to acquire underwater whistles. You can now try to communicate with many species of whales and dolphins. Seadragon could be described as Instant Messaging for dolphins and humans. It does not translate whistles. It tries to recognize them, it gives a name to unrecognized ones, and it is up to you to figure out their meaning, if any. It allows you to emit whistles underwater and to see the text names of whistles emitted by cetaceans in response to yours. This Version 1.0 Beta is for early adapters: adventurous cetacean communication scientists or whale watchers with a technical bent. Some free support is provided via email." I can't belive it's real either.

Java Mobile Page Turner   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
CNN reports that Java-powered phones are being used to read electronic novels in Japan. "Tens of thousands of Japanese cell phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens," with the books "downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications."

Trendy Look and Feel   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Trendysoft have announced the release of their Trendy Look and Feel library. "We are proud to anounce the availablity of Trendy look and feel. Trendy look and feel is a brand new swing look and feel...Trendy look and feel is a commerical look and feel but is completly free to be used at Non-commerical projects."

Apache Cocoon 2.1.7   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Carsten Ziegler has announced the release of Cocoon 2.1.7. "Today we released the latest version of Apache Cocoon: 2.1.7. In this maintenance release we fixed some bugs, added some minor features and made the version buildable/runnable with JDK 5.0. In addition I silently released the first version of CoWarp, 0.2, which can be used as a replacement for the Cocoon authentication framework."

Eclipse 3.0.2   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
The Eclipse consortium has released version 3.0.2 of the Eclipse platform. A detailed list of bug fixes to 3.0.2 RC3 can be found here.

TestNG Plugin Initial Release   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Alexandru Popescu of the TestNG testing framework project has released their first version of a plugin for Eclipse. It features adding a TestNG view, TestNG launcher, and a contextual TestNG launcher.

Early Draft Review: JSR 250 - Common Annotations for the Java Platform.   25 Mar 2005 05:00 GMT
Sun Microsystems has published an early draft review of JSR 250 - Common Annotations for the Java Platform. "This JSR well develop annotations for common semantic concepts in the J2SE and J2EE platforms that apply across a variety of individual technologies. With the addition of JSR 175 (A Metadata Facility for the JavaTM Programming Language) in the Java platform we envision that various JSRs will use annotations to enable a declarative style of programming. It would be unfortunate if these JSRs each independently defined their own annotations for common concepts. It would be especially valuable to have consistency within the J2EE 5.0 component JSRs, but it will also be valuable to allowconsistency between J2EE and J2SE."