Jakarta Lucene 1.3 released

Jakarta Lucene 1.3 has just been released on December 26th.
It is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

Greg Wilkins: Servlets must DIE! Slowly!!

Greg Wilkins has has written an interesting article named Servlets must DIE! Slowly!! concerning servlets and "contentlets".

I don't agree in all terms but I think he has some valid points.

TimeCore - Freeware Timetracking Software

TimeCore is an award winning time tracking tool combining an elegant and intuitive interface with an industrial strength recording engine.
For people who need to track their time but find existing solutions overly complex or too lightweight, TimeCore Solo is free, delivering full round-trip functionality without any restrictions.

This is really one of the most usable time tracking software which allows great flexibility, is open (plain text and Excel export) and is easy to use - and this all for free!

Linux 2.6.0

Some hours ago Linus Torvalds released the long awaited Linux 2.6.0.
As always with an unspectacular mail.
Download Linux 2.6.0 from your nearest mirror.

JAMon - Java Application Monitor

The Java Application Monitor (JAMon) is a free, simple, high performance, thread safe, Java API that allows developers to easily monitor production applications. JAMon can be used to determine application performance bottlenecks, user/application interactions, and application scalability. JAMon gathers summary statistics such as hits, execution times (total, average, minimum, maximum, standard deviation), and simultaneous application requests. JAMon statistics are displayed in the clickable JAMon Report.

To use JAMon you simply plugin the jar file and:

import com.jamonapi.*;
...
Monitor mon=MonitorFactory.start("myFirstMonitor");
...Code Being Timed...
mon.stop();


XQuark - open source information integration components based on XML and XQuery

The XQuark project consists of open source information integration components based on XML and XQuery.
Found through Sylvain Wallez on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist.

Almost Free Text

Almost Free Text is a document preparation system. It is mostly free form meaning that there is little intrusive markup. AFT source documents look a lot like plain old ASCII text.
AFT has a few rules for structuring your document and these rules have more to do with formatting your text rather than embedding commands.
Right now, AFT produces pretty good (weblint-able) HTML, XHTML, LaTeX, lout and RTF. It can, in fact, be coerced into producing all types of output (e.g. roll-your-own XML). All that needs to be done is to edit a rule file. You can even customize your own HTML rule files for specialized output.

Bossa - Lightweight Java Workflow Engine

Bossa is a workflow engine written in Java. The engine is very fast and lightweight, uses a very expressive Petri net notation to define workflows, does not require a RDBMS and is very simple to use and to integrate with java applications.

Web Design and Usability Guidelines

* Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
* 3-click-rule
* The Myth of the 7 +/- 2 Rule
* The Magical Number Seven
* Articles about User Interface Engineering

Skype - P2P telephony

My brother, Matthias, just told me about Skype which is an excellent (and free!) software, which allows you to do free phone calls through the internet - all over the world.
I tried it out and was really surprised about the good quality and easy handling.
What can I say more, the slogan "P2P telephony that just works" is definitely right.
Here are some features of Skype:
* Free unlimited worldwide phone calls to other Skype users
* Superior sound quality - better than your regular phone
* Works with all firewall, NAT and routers ? nothing to configure!
* Friends list shows you when your Skype friends are online and ready to talk or chat
* Super-simple and easy to use
* Your calls are encrypted "end-to-end" for superior privacy
* Based on cutting edge peer-to-peer technology developed by the creators of Kazaa and Joltid

JAG - Java Application Generator

JAG (Java Application Generator) is an application that creates complete, working J2EE applications. It is intended to alleviate much of the repetitive work involved in creating such applications, while providing a means of quality assurance that the applications created will be of consistent quality.
There are also some screenshots of JAG available.

Eclipse 3.0M5 released

Eclipse 3.0M3 has been released with a big number of new and noteworthy features.

J2EE 1.4 Final Released

J2EE 1.4 Final has been released recently. There is also a J2EE 1.4 Developer Release SDK available for download.

JSCalendar - DHTML Calendar Widget

JSCalendar is a really cool DHTML calendar widget with many features and works on a big number of browsers.

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service allows you to find bugs in Linux executables by uploading it and specify the arguments by which the program fails and when it doesn't fail.
Igor tells you where the problem is ...

Ballmer/Gates in The Matrix

I've seldom seen something funny like that from Microsoft:
* Comdex 2003 Bill Gates Keynote - The Matrix
I didn't know that Microsoft has so much sense of humor!

Cocoon Day 2003

I just return from the Cocoon Day 2003 here in Vienna.
It was the first bigger official Cocoon-centric one-day workshop of this kind. It was organized - and very well to be mentioned - mainly by Reinhard Pötz and Alexander Schatten. The event gave a really great overview of the Cocoon basics, some advanced infos and best practices and not to forget many practical use cases.

Perhaps many don't even know, that many (if not all) of the speakers - which were coming from Austria, Swiss and Germany - were not paid for this.
So many thanks to them!

I'm looking forward for more such great events in Austria!

Interesting W3C News

The latest Weekly Newsletter from W3C I got today has many interesting news for you:

W3C Recommendations:
* Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition)

Last Calls Working Drafts:
* XQuery 1.0
* XSLT 2.0
* XPath 2.0
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics
* XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization
* XML Query (XQuery) Requirements
* XML Query Use Cases
* XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0

Working Drafts:
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Message Patterns
* SOAP Optimized Serialization Use Cases and Requirements
* Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2

Notes:
* Units in MathML
* Structured Types in MathML 2.0
* Bound Variables in MathML

Software:
* Amaya 8.2 Editor/Browser Released

NOVA | The Elegant Universe | PBS

I just found this slashdot article about The Elegant Universe of the NOVA program.
There are many resources including the whole 3 hour video viewable online.
I definitely have to take some time to view it.

Internet Mapping Projects

* Internet Mapping Project
* The OPTE Project
The last one seems to be really promising since the resulting code will be distributed freely and it claims to scan the whole internet within only one day.