10th Jini Community Meeting, Call for Papers announced

Mostly a bugfix release form version 1.9, the Lucene project released the 2.0 version of its popular open-source search engine tool. The latest release removes most deprecated methods, and provides many new features over the last major version.

Maven 2 is Apache's project management tool that assists in configuring a project's build environment, dependencies, reporting, and documentation in a central configuration file. At the heart of that file is the project object model (POM). Eric Redmond's recent JavaWorld article explains how to set up a Java project with Maven 2's POM.

1. New features: Field Name Aliasing and Case-insensitive Field Lookups. 2. Significant refactoring and enhancement of the Open-RJ/.NET mapping. 3. And 21 new C and C++ example programs.

XSD is an open-source, cross-platform W3C XML Schema to C++ translator. Provided with a schema, it generates C++ classes that represent the given vocabulary as well as parsing and serialization code. You can then access the data stored in XML using types and functions that semantically correspond to your domain instead of dealing with DOM or SAX.

This is a beta preview of version 1.9.1 of the STLSoft libraries, incorporating a considerable number of changes from the 1.8.x versions. Notable new additions are the new Control Panel and ToolHelp (thanks, Pablo!) libraries, as well as enhancements to the dl_call() library (for both UNIX and Win32).

jBPM is JBoss' open source business process management tool. Among other features, jBPM provides a graphical designer to model and orchestrate tasks and workflows corresponding to business processes. In a recent JavaWorld article, Jeff Hanson shows how to manage complex and changing business requirements with jBPM.

A key component of Java EE 5 is the Java Persistence API (JPA) that provides an object-relational mapping framework for enterprise applications. Although formally part of the EJB 3 spec, the JPA can be used stand-alone. In a recent java.net article, Josh Marinacci shows how to use JPA from a simple client-side application.

<a href=http://www.xoreax.com>Xoreax Software</a> has announced the release of IncrediBuild v2.50. IncrediBuild cuts down compilation and build time by up to 90% by distributing C/C++ compilation tasks across machines in the local network.

In his latest DeveloperWorks article, Brian Goetz discusses strategies for dealing with InterruptedException. The article shows how swallowing InterruptedException can lead to unpredictable application behavior, and outlines strategies for cancellable tasks as a way to manage this aspect of Java concurrency.

Tangosol and DataSynapse Partner to Extend Benefits of Virtualization to Data-Intensive Applications - Partnership to Eliminate Data Latency for Enterprise Applications Operating in a Shared Infrastructure

shwild is a simple, platform-independent, library that implements shell-compatible wildcard pattern matching. It is implemented in C/C++, expressing a C-API, with a C++ wrapper. Version 0.9.1 is its first release.

The NetBeans project released the 5.5 beta version of its Java IDE with support for Java EE 5, including Java Persistence, simplified development of session beans and message driven beans, and an enhanced Java source editor targeting EJB 3, and support for the Servlet 2.5, JavaServer Pages 2.1, JavaServer Faces 1.2 specs.

Facelets aim to solve a mismatch between JSP and JSF by defining a templating language built with the JSF component life cycle in mind. Rick Hightower's article on advanced Facelets development shows how to internationalize with Facelets, define and use custom logic tags, and how to do metaprogramming with Facelets.

The Annual JCP Awards recognize outstanding contributions to Java specifications. This year's awards will be presented on May 17, 2006, at the JavaOne JCP Community Event. Here's a list of nominated JSRs.