Slashdot Mirror

ikewillis writes "According to an announcement on apache.org, Apache 2.2.0 has been released. From the announcement: 'This version of Apache is a major release and the start of a new stable branch. New features include Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization.' View the ChangeLog or check out the new feature list."

ikewillis writes "According to an announcement on apache.org, Apache 2.2.0 has been released. From the announcement: 'This version of Apache is a major release and the start of a new stable branch. New features include Smart Filtering, Improved Caching, AJP Proxy, Proxy Load Balancing, Graceful Shutdown support, Large File Support, the Event MPM, and refactored Authentication/Authorization.' View the ChangeLog or check out the new feature list."

corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"

Pankaj Kumar writes "Controversies aside, JBoss has emerged as a credible alternative to commercial J2EE App Servers for developing and deploying Java based server applications. Besides the usual advantages of open source and GPL licensing, what sets it apart is its JMX based microkernel, a light-weight framework to run independently developed Java programs within a single JVM. Together, these make it possible for one to pick and choose components and assemble a custom server anywhere between the two extremes (and beyond!) of a simple Servlet Container and a full-fledged J2EE Server. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook by Norman Richards, a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and Sam Griffith, Jr., a software consultant and trainer, is a no-fluff How-To guide on doing stuff with JBoss in O'Reilly's new Developer Notebook format." Read on for Kumar's review of the book. JBoss - A Developer's Notebook author Norman Richards & Sam Griffith, Jr. pages 150 publisher O' Reilly rating 7 reviewer Pankaj Kumar ISBN 0596100078 summary A How To Guide on Working With JBoss

True to the format, this book doesn't waste pages on paeans to architectural elegance, internal design or conceptual deliberations, and limits itself to the basic needs of most professionals -- how do I do this or that with JBoss, where to start, what steps to carry out or what code to write, and what happens behind the curtains.

Books dealing with J2EE products tend to be fat and bulky, but this (note)book doesn't fall in that category. By covering only JBoss specific aspects and avoiding general J2EE topics, this rather thin book has managed to include a good deal of difficult-to-find information about JBoss. In fact, while going through its pages, I got a feeling that the authors have taken care to be different and complementary to the online documentation available in the JBoss Application Server Guide and JBoss Wiki.

In support of the above claim, let me compare the coverage of how to deploy applications under JBoss, an important activity with any J2EE container, in the JBoss Guide, JBoss Wiki, and the book under review. The JBoss Guide covers application deployment as part of the JMX based microkernel architecture and design, describing, in excruciating detail, the internal components responsible for the deployment and and how they interact. The JBoss Wiki takes a more externally focused approach, talking about hot deployment capability, relevant directories and configuration files in an installed system, and steps in a typical deployment process. In contrast, Developer's Notebook goes through the whole process of creating the deployable WAR file for a web application, deploying that to JBoss by copying the created file to JBoss's deploy directory, and verifying successful deployment or looking for errors. It even talks about how to modify a deployed application. Needless to say, the last one is most useful to someone who just wants to deploy his or her application.

True to its lab notebook style, the book makes important, though not integral, observations about specific topics in the page margins. For example, a note in the margin of deployment steps tells you that you can include a deployment package within another deployment package, up to an arbitrary level of nesting, a la Russian doll packaging. I found this informal way of communicating relevant stuff quite effective.

Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that it makes generous use of appropriate tools, such as Ant and XDoclet, to get things done. This can be either good or bad, depending upon your familiarity with these tools. For me, it turned out to be a mixed bag. I know Ant and am happy writing Ant scripts for packaging and deployment. It is different with XDoclet, which I haven't had a chance to use so far. But perhaps the authors know better and one should just get familiar with it before working on any project involving JBoss and Enterprise Java Beans.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to cover each and every aspect of software as feature rich and complex as JBoss in any single book. This leaves the somewhat unpleasant task of choosing topics to the the authors and editors, for the selection may or may not match the needs of a particular reader. At the same time, it increases the responsibility of a reviewer like me who must help a prospective buyer decide for or against making a purchase, based on her needs.

Let me attempt to do that by making two lists: first, what is included and then, what is not.

What is included (paraphrased Table of Contents):

• How to install, start, examine (through JMX Console) and shutdown JBoss Server.
• How to package, deploy, observe and undeploy an application.
• How to create a web application with database access and user authentication.
• How to use MySQL as database for a JBoss application.
• How to setup user database, login modules and enable SSL.
• How to configure logging for various components of JBoss.
• How to map schema, objects and relations to database tables.
• How to monitor and manage a JBoss application with MBeans.
• How to create a custom JBoss with modules that your application needs.

A similar, comprehensive, list of what is not included is simply not possible. Still, I have gone ahead and created the following based on my experience with JBoss. Keep in mind that these reflect the kind of applications I have worked on and may not be representative of your needs.

• How to use JBoss as a J2SE container.
• How to develop Web services with JBoss.
• How to create, package and deploy an application consisting of JBoss services, web applications and web services.
• How to troubleshoot class loading problems.
• How to isolate applications within a single JBoss server instance.
• How to profile for performance bottlenecks.
• How to run multiple instances of JBoss Server on a single machine.

I can only hope that the authors will take this as a reader feedback and include some of the above in a future edition.

So, what else is there not to like about this book? One thing that caught my attention was the relative absence of insight into why things worked the way they worked: What are the underlying patterns and how can the awareness about these patterns be applied to other similar situations? These are the things I look for in a new product or technology, and have found them to be much more helpful than just a compilation of step-by-step descriptions of doing things. Perhaps the Developer's Notebook format doesn't allow for such digressions, still I think inclusion of such insights would have improved the book.

Overall, I would say that JBoss - A Developer's Notebook is a good introductory book for those who are thinking of getting started or are just getting started with JBoss. If you have already worked on JBoss and are looking for more advanced or esoteric stuff, then this book is perhaps not for you.

You can purchase JBoss - A Developer's Notebook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review. Lucene in Action author Gospodnetic and Hatcher pages 421 (7 pages of index) publisher Manning rating 9 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 1932394281 summary Solid introduction to Lucene Who's it for? Lucene is a library and framework, rather than a complete application. It truly is an engine, around which you are expected to build and extend your own application. Like Lucene, the book is targeted at those who are looking for a tool to build their own search facility application rather than just "download and go." The book does include a number of case studies of Lucene usage (including at least one download and go search engine) but those are included to show how to use and adapt Lucene to fit differing environments rather than as ends in themselves. The Structure The book is sensibly divided into two parts. The first part looks at "Core Lucene" functionality, while the second part addresses "Applied Lucene".

Part one has six chapters, covering the central components and inner workings of Lucene. It's here that the book starts with a tutorial introduction, familiarising the reader with the concepts of Lucene as a search engine around which you wrap your own code. The other five chapters move steadily through good search engine fare, with indexing getting the whole of chapter two to itself The discussion of how to retrieve text from the documents being indexed is mentioned here but postponed until chapter seven, where it is dealt with exhaustively. Chapter three covers searching, and especially how Lucene ranks documents.

Chapter four examines analysis. In it's chapter introduction, the book explains that "Analysis, in Lucene, is the process of converting field text into it's most fundamental indexed representation, terms." This process is performed by an analyser, which tokenises text according to it's own built in rules; each analyser will have a different emphasis, some want only dictionary words, others might explicitly include acronyms and sometimes you'll want an analyser that will block stop words (those words in languages that are part of the structure, but that add nothing to the information being conveyed by the text; classic examples of stop words in English include "a", "and" and "the").

Chapter five looks at advanced search techniques; everything from sorting search results, searching on multiple fields to filtering searches. Many free or open source software tools are extensible, and Lucene is no exception. Chapter six addresses creating and using custom components within Lucene, everything from custom sort methods to custom filters.

Part two, the final four chapters, cover Applied Lucene. It is dedicated to practical uses of Lucene and answers the question "So, what can I do with a search engine?" Chapter seven covers ways and means to parse common, non-plain text document formats. The primary formats covered are RTF, XML, PDF, HTML and Microsoft Word. The ability to parse and index these file formats will cover the search engine needs of the majority of Lucene users. Chapter eight looks at a number of Lucene tools and extensions that are available; many of them being free and open source software. Chapter nine covers ports of Lucene. While for many users, Lucene being a Java library is not a problem, some users want its functionality in environments that do not have Java. The chapter looks at ports written in C++, C#, Perl and Python. Lastly, chapter ten takes a thorough look at seven Lucene case studies. Perhaps the "star" case study is the one about Nutch, a download and go search engine written by Doug Cutting , the original author of Lucene.

There are three appendices. The first offers installation advice for Lucene; a useful addition that those newer to working with Java libraries will surely appreciate. The second appendix has a very well explained description of the Lucene index format. This is the kind of information that can be hard to find, so it is welcome in a book of this sort. The last appendix contains a number of categorised resource references. The number and breadth of the resources provided could provide quite an incredible education in information retrieval theory if the reader was inclined to read them all. What's to Like? There are several things to like about this book. Let's start with the fact that the authors are part of the core development team of Lucene. This gives them both credibility and an excellent understanding of the internal workings of Lucene. Co-author Erik Hatcher is a fantastic writer, having previously been a co-author of the only Ant book worth bothering with, Manning's Java Development with Ant . (Full disclosure: I do know Erik personally.)

The structure of the book is well thought out and each chapter does seem to move your understanding forward when combined with what you learned from the proceeding ones. The division into core and applied Lucene is also helpful. While you'd hope that this was the case, it often isn't; hence I note it as a positive.

I especially appreciate that this book does not fill up page after page with API documentation. The authors appear to have grasped that if you have Internet access to download the software, you might just be able to access the documentation online; rather, they concentrate on the way to use the software. What a concept!

As a part of Manning's "in Action" series, the book has excellent layout and has obviously been thoroughly edited by both technical evaluators and copyeditors. This might seem to be a small thing to some, but a well-edited book stands out clearly from the crowd. What's to consider? If you are looking for a book on using and configuring a download and go style of search engine, this book would be less suitable. While the case study on Nutch is of good length, it would be too short to useful as a configuration guide. Conclusion I enjoyed reading this book. If you have any text searching needs, this book will be more than sufficient equipment to guide you to successful completion. Even, if you are just looking to download a pre-written search engine, then this book will provide a good background to the nature of information retrieval in general and text indexing and searching specifically.

You can purchase Lucene in Action from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Simon P. Chappell writes "I don't know about you, but I hardly bother with browser bookmarks any more. I used to have so many bookmarks, back in the early days of Netscape's 4 series, that I would have to regularly trim and edit my bookmark file to prevent my browser from crashing on startup -- that's a lot of bookmarks, folks! Now, I go to my favourite web search engine, enter a couple of appropriate search terms and voila, there's my page! Search engines are so ubiquitous that we rarely give much thought to the technology that powers them. Lucene in Action by Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher , both committers on the Lucene project, goes behind the HTML and takes you on a guided tour of Lucene, one of a generation of powerful Free and Open-Source search engines now available." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review. Lucene in Action author Gospodnetic and Hatcher pages 421 (7 pages of index) publisher Manning rating 9 reviewer Simon P. Chappell ISBN 1932394281 summary Solid introduction to Lucene Who's it for? Lucene is a library and framework, rather than a complete application. It truly is an engine, around which you are expected to build and extend your own application. Like Lucene, the book is targeted at those who are looking for a tool to build their own search facility application rather than just "download and go." The book does include a number of case studies of Lucene usage (including at least one download and go search engine) but those are included to show how to use and adapt Lucene to fit differing environments rather than as ends in themselves. The Structure The book is sensibly divided into two parts. The first part looks at "Core Lucene" functionality, while the second part addresses "Applied Lucene".

Part one has six chapters, covering the central components and inner workings of Lucene. It's here that the book starts with a tutorial introduction, familiarising the reader with the concepts of Lucene as a search engine around which you wrap your own code. The other five chapters move steadily through good search engine fare, with indexing getting the whole of chapter two to itself The discussion of how to retrieve text from the documents being indexed is mentioned here but postponed until chapter seven, where it is dealt with exhaustively. Chapter three covers searching, and especially how Lucene ranks documents.

Chapter four examines analysis. In it's chapter introduction, the book explains that "Analysis, in Lucene, is the process of converting field text into it's most fundamental indexed representation, terms." This process is performed by an analyser, which tokenises text according to it's own built in rules; each analyser will have a different emphasis, some want only dictionary words, others might explicitly include acronyms and sometimes you'll want an analyser that will block stop words (those words in languages that are part of the structure, but that add nothing to the information being conveyed by the text; classic examples of stop words in English include "a", "and" and "the").

Chapter five looks at advanced search techniques; everything from sorting search results, searching on multiple fields to filtering searches. Many free or open source software tools are extensible, and Lucene is no exception. Chapter six addresses creating and using custom components within Lucene, everything from custom sort methods to custom filters.

Part two, the final four chapters, cover Applied Lucene. It is dedicated to practical uses of Lucene and answers the question "So, what can I do with a search engine?" Chapter seven covers ways and means to parse common, non-plain text document formats. The primary formats covered are RTF, XML, PDF, HTML and Microsoft Word. The ability to parse and index these file formats will cover the search engine needs of the majority of Lucene users. Chapter eight looks at a number of Lucene tools and extensions that are available; many of them being free and open source software. Chapter nine covers ports of Lucene. While for many users, Lucene being a Java library is not a problem, some users want its functionality in environments that do not have Java. The chapter looks at ports written in C++, C#, Perl and Python. Lastly, chapter ten takes a thorough look at seven Lucene case studies. Perhaps the "star" case study is the one about Nutch, a download and go search engine written by Doug Cutting , the original author of Lucene.

There are three appendices. The first offers installation advice for Lucene; a useful addition that those newer to working with Java libraries will surely appreciate. The second appendix has a very well explained description of the Lucene index format. This is the kind of information that can be hard to find, so it is welcome in a book of this sort. The last appendix contains a number of categorised resource references. The number and breadth of the resources provided could provide quite an incredible education in information retrieval theory if the reader was inclined to read them all. What's to Like? There are several things to like about this book. Let's start with the fact that the authors are part of the core development team of Lucene. This gives them both credibility and an excellent understanding of the internal workings of Lucene. Co-author Erik Hatcher is a fantastic writer, having previously been a co-author of the only Ant book worth bothering with, Manning's Java Development with Ant . (Full disclosure: I do know Erik personally.)

The structure of the book is well thought out and each chapter does seem to move your understanding forward when combined with what you learned from the proceeding ones. The division into core and applied Lucene is also helpful. While you'd hope that this was the case, it often isn't; hence I note it as a positive.

I especially appreciate that this book does not fill up page after page with API documentation. The authors appear to have grasped that if you have Internet access to download the software, you might just be able to access the documentation online; rather, they concentrate on the way to use the software. What a concept!

As a part of Manning's "in Action" series, the book has excellent layout and has obviously been thoroughly edited by both technical evaluators and copyeditors. This might seem to be a small thing to some, but a well-edited book stands out clearly from the crowd. What's to consider? If you are looking for a book on using and configuring a download and go style of search engine, this book would be less suitable. While the case study on Nutch is of good length, it would be too short to useful as a configuration guide. Conclusion I enjoyed reading this book. If you have any text searching needs, this book will be more than sufficient equipment to guide you to successful completion. Even, if you are just looking to download a pre-written search engine, then this book will provide a good background to the nature of information retrieval in general and text indexing and searching specifically.

You can purchase Lucene in Action from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

schon writes "Today's the last day of ApacheCon Europe; There was a hilarious presentation entitled 'Why I Hate the Apache Web Server' for anyone who has expressed frustration with the various inconsistencies and nuances of the Internet's favourite config file. And yes, it includes a comparison to Sendmail."

pankaj_kumar writes "Apache Ant, the Java replacement for make , belongs to the rare breed of category killer software for automating Java software development tasks. It is an Apache open source project, has won numerous awards, boasts comprehensive online documentation and is used by most Java developers. So, what could a book say that is already not available online?" Read on for Kumar's review of Ant: The Definitive Guide. Ant The Definitive Guide author Steve Holzner pages 316 publisher O'Reilly rating 8 reviewer Pankaj Kumar ISBN 0596006098 summary Complete Build Management for Java with Ant

As a long time Ant user, I have written many Ant build scripts, automating my builds and speeding up the overall development cycle, mostly relying on its excellent online documentation. As a Java developer, I have admired its simple and intuitive interface and the modular design. So on getting Ant: The Definitive Guide in my hands I wasn't expecting a whole lot new to learn, and thought of using it only as a reference book.

After having the book on my desk for more than a month, though, and occasionally flipping through its pages whenever I would otherwise have consulted the online documentation, I must say that I had been missing out on some very important things: tasks like ftp and war deployment that I was simply not aware of and had never felt the need to look up, but could very well use. The other interesting thing I noticed was that my build scripts became smaller, more modular and easier to read.

Like most books in the The Definitive Guide series, Ant The Definitive Guide assumes a certain level of familiarity with underlying technologies such as Java and XML and focuses on providing complete, reference like details of Ant features and tasks. These description are generously supplemented with examples and code fragments.

But so is the the online documentation for Ant! Will someone gain additional insight in using Ant, or be able to work faster, or make better use of Ant capabilities, by consulting this book, instead of the online documentation for a particular Ant task? To find the answer, I randomly picked two topics -- filesets, an important and oft-used Ant datatype, and javac, a core Ant task -- and compared their online description with the one in the book. Here is what I found.

Besides the datatype definition, explanation of various attributes, sub-elements, and the examples, the book also covers how to specify conditional inclusion or exclusion of certain filename patterns when a property is set (or unset). Though this can be inferred from online documentation by a determined user, this particular use is far from obvious. The coverage in the book also talks about the relationship of the fileset datatype with the javac task, pointing out that the fileset attribute dir is equivalent of javac attribute srcdir, as attribute dir will be confusing in javac: is it referring to source directory or destination directory. This is the kind of insight that really helps a user.

The treatment of the javac task in the book is not much different from the one in the online documentation. Both have almost the same material, though the information in the book is better organized for new users. On the other hand, I found the online documentation to be more complete, especially with respect to the compiler specific options and behavior idiosyncrasies.

Here is a rundown on what the book covers: Chapter 1, Getting Started is a quick primer on Ant, with sufficient details for a new user to start using Ant for very simple build tasks. Chapter 2, Using Properties and Types introduces the building block tasks and datatypes, such as property, condition, fileset, path like structures, selectors and so on, used in other Ant tasks. Chapter 3, Building Java Code covers the tasks and activities around compiling Java source files (ie; javac), organizing the build steps in various targets within a single build scripts and/or across multiple scripts, generating documentation using javadoc and creating distribution jars and zip files. The rest of the chapters are devoted to tasks for specific purposes, such as launching external programs (Chapter 7, Executing External Programs), copying files and manipulating directories either on the same machine or over the network (Chapter 4, Deploying Builds), running JUnit tests (Chapter 5, Testing Builds with JUnit) and so on. There are also separate chapters covering interaction of Ant with XML and XDoclet (Chapter 9, XML and XDoclet) and with Eclipse (Chapter 11, Integrating Ant with Eclipse). The last chapter, Chapter 12, Extending Ant, talks about extending Ant by doing things like adding your own tasks, creating custom filters, writing your own build listeners and loggers etc. This chapter also has a small section on how to embed a script written in one of the supported scripting languages within an Ant script.

As you can see from this outline, the book covers almost everything that is to know about Ant and other related software.

So, what is not so good about this book? Well, I didn't find anything wrong with the topics which are actually covered by the book. Of course, there are additional things that I would have liked to see in the book: (a) A good sample Ant script which could be used as the starting point for most small to medium-sized projects; (b) A more thorough explanation of how dependencies among targets determine the execution sequence and how this fits in with explicit invocation of targets; and (c) pictures to illustrate some of the concepts such as life cycle of an Ant task, selection of files in a fileset and the dependency tree of targets.

Overall, I found the book to be comprehensive, well organized, easy to read and good value for money.

You can purchase Ant: The Definitive Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

breadiu asks: "I work for a department at a university, and we'd love to offer students some type of web-accessible file storage, but, like most educational institutions, money is tight. There are some great closed source solutions out there like Xythos' Digital Locker Suite, but those cost. I've had trouble finding a really well put together open source solution. I've taken a look at Slide and even Zope, but neither really match up to Xythos' offerings. What have others done to provide centralized file storage/management? Is there anything OSS that offers WebDAV, Apache support, BSD/Linux support and Active Directory-LDAP authentication with support for Windows and Mac clients?"

coreboarder asks: "Google recently revamped their nifty little Google Mini. It now does 100,000 documents of 220 different formats, makes your bed, and pours your beer. Where I work we have a reasonably large amount of technical data files (~80,000) of varying formats stored on a number of Windows 2000 and 2003 servers. File access is handled by permissions on the containing folder(s). Over time duplication has crept in because people cannot find what they need where they expect it to be. The $3,000 price point on the Google Mini is very attractive but is their a better way of making files and their content easily findable on a 1000 node network while still retaining their security? We also use ht://dig but it cannot handle all the file formats that would be involved here." In that same vein, Gneral Tsao asks: "As an IT worker for a small research business, I'm trying to find a good text search engine for our subscriber facing publications. After much searching, I've found a few prospects such as Mnogosearch (which we currently use), Nutch, and Swish-e, but really no discussion about or comparison between them. This seems like a job for the Slashdot community. An ideal solution for me would be able to handle 20,000 or so pages, have a customizable PHP frontend, and allow for some amount of control over categorization." Any suggestions?

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

Bruce writes "Newsforge is reporting that Java 2 Standard Edition, may soon be set free of Sun Microsystems' notoriously complicated licensing. A group of 12 Apache developers have put together a proposal called Harmony. The proposal appeared as a simple project call last Friday on an Apache incubator mailing list. It would make this new, built-from-the-ground-up version of Java available under the Apache 2.0 free software license. And it's causing quite a stir in the Java community, especially since respected Sun frontmen Tim Bray, Simon Phipps, and Graham Hamilton have given the project their blessing. As yet there has been no reaction from Dr. Java, James Gosling himself, who is in Brazil talking to developers. In a FAQ on the Apache site, Harmony project leader Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: 'We believe that there is broad community interest in coming together to create and use an open source, compatible implementation of J2SE 5, the latest version of the Java 2 Standard Edition specification. While the Java Community Process has allowed open source implementations of JSRs for a few years now, Java 5 is the first of the J2SE specs that we are able to do due to licensing reasons.'"

emmjayell writes "You've been there, loaded up a new application (think server-based app like Apache or Samba ...), it's working okay for a few days or a few months, then the intermittent problems start. Usually it's the CEO or someone else of relative importance that is the first victim. You can't readily duplicate the problem, so you go to find out where the application put's it's logs - maybe it's in var/log/messages - maybe in it's own directory - sometimes it's right there and available in some administrative GUI. So what makes you happiest when diagnosing the problem? Do you want tools to access it? UI or command line? Do you want it formatted to use tools like cut and sed? Do you have any examples of an app that does a great job with system logging and diag logging? Background: My team is working on an application that is gearing up for a first release. We have a logging framework in place already (we are using Apache: logging.apache.org/) -- so that covers how we are logging, but not what we should log and how it should be laid out for optimal use."

mparaz writes "Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation announced a J2SE 5 implementation project called 'Harmony.' It covers the virtual machine and the class libraries, and aims to pass the Sun specification. A FAQ is available."

mparaz writes "Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation announced a J2SE 5 implementation project called 'Harmony.' It covers the virtual machine and the class libraries, and aims to pass the Sun specification. A FAQ is available."

yoyhed writes "Apache 2.0.54 was released today, and is principally a bug fix release. Here's the official announcement, changelog, and download link."

yoyhed writes "Apache 2.0.54 was released today, and is principally a bug fix release. Here's the official announcement, changelog, and download link."

yoyhed writes "Apache 2.0.54 was released today, and is principally a bug fix release. Here's the official announcement, changelog, and download link."

An anonymous reader writes "Sun have announced the OpenSolaris community advisory board, chaired by Roy Felding (co founder and director of the Apache Foundatation), two community appointed people, Rich Teer and Al Hooper (both members of the infamous gang of six that helped to get Sun to restart Solaris x86) and two sun employees - well known open source evangelist Simon Phipps and kernel engineer Casper Dik. No date for the code release as of yet, but it can't be far off now."

orest writes "Microsoft took a whack at it with WEFT. Bitstream tried TrueDoc. But someone has finally gotten somewhere with sIFR. sIFR allows web designers to render font outlines -- and thereby their preferred fonts -- in a visitor's web browser, without those fonts being installed on the visitor's computer. sIFR relies on JavaScript and Flash to accomplish its magic. A similar, bleeding-edge solution exists in Batik, an open-source SVG browser from the Apache Foundation."

comforteagle writes "Howard Wen has conducted an interview with Daniel Quinlan of SpamAssassin. In it he explores what keeps Daniel motivated in the face of the unrelenting torrent of spam and new spamming techniques, as well as, what is working - what is not, and what he predicts spammers have up their sleeves next for defeating spam detection." From the interview: "If you don't mind deleting spam manually, that's your prerogative, but don't complain about it. If your ISP doesn't do a good job fighting spam, then switch ISPs or install your own anti-spam software. There are a lot of choices out there."

CGIsecurity.com writes "Two security issues have been addressed in Apache's 2.0.53 build. The entire Apache announcement can be found here."

CGIsecurity.com writes "Two security issues have been addressed in Apache's 2.0.53 build. The entire Apache announcement can be found here."

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."

An anonymous reader writes "It seems like some of the members of the Apache Software Foundation are a little angry with the PHP Community because they don't recommend using Apache 2.0 with PHP. Since PHP is installed on half of all Apache servers this is a major issue for them. A number of high-profile PHP community members such as John Coggeshall and Chris Shiflett have blogged about this decision in light of a recent posting by Apache Software Foundation Member Rich Bowen which called PHP's anti-Apache2 stance FUD. Is there any real reason for the PHP community to start recommending Apache 2.0, especially when the 1.3.x series of Apache is rock solid and proven? Note Rich did later commend PHP for being a great product, so it's not all flames."

An anonymous reader writes "Various news sources are reporting the 4.0 release of the free Java-based NetBeans IDE. You can read the anouncement, or proceed directly to the downloads. Perhaps the most significant improvement is that the IDE's native build system is the latest version of Apache Ant. I see this as a distinct advantage over its competitor Eclipse (and NetBeans is pure Java). If you create desktop applications in Java, you may wish to read up on the NetBeans 'platform' as well. Enjoy."

Petri Aerikkala writes "Don't judge a book by its cover, but by what it covers. How Tomcat Works has a very ordinary cover, but I cannot overemphasize how useful its contents are. This book does what the title says, plus much more. It is useful for not only those using Tomcat or those working with servlets/JSP/J2EE, but also for all Java developers in general." Read on for the rest of Aerikkala's review. How Tomcat Works author Budi Kurniawan and Paul Deck pages 458 publisher BrainySoftware rating 8 reviewer Petri ISBN 097521280X summary Explains how Tomcat works and how to build a servlet container of your own

First of all, this is the only book I know of that explains how the complete system works. You can find good documentation on how to use this most popular servlet container on the Tomcat project's Web site, but little is said about how it works. If you want to join this open source project, good luck. You should consider yourself lucky (or very brilliant) if you can understand how the system works in less than 3 months by browsing through its millions of lines of code.

However, why I find this book appealing is because of the approach the authors take in analyzing it: build Tomcat from scratch, line of code by line of code, module by module. Miraculously, in doing so they never fail to make sure their readers can follow the technical discussions. In their hands, Tomcat looks easy that even beginners of Java can understand. There are many complex technologies used in Tomcat, and they are all explained well.

The book starts off by building a dummy Web server that can do no more than sending a static HTML page. The web server is simple and consists of only three classes. The backbone of this application is the java.net.Socket class, and the authors take their time explaining this class at the beginning of the chapter. Basically, this is how the application in this chapter works: for each HTTP request, open a socket connection to the client, read the content of the static file, and send the file to the browser. As simple as that.

Chapter 2 builds on the application in Chapter 1. In this chapter, the web server gets some intelligence. It is now able to invoke a basic servlet by calling the servlet's service method. However, more complex servlets are beyond this simple servlet container, mainly because the container passes a null ServletRequest and a null ServletResponse objects to the service method. Before the authors start coding, they explain the javax.servlet package in general so that those new to servlet programming can understand this chapter.

Chapter 3 explains how to create ServletRequest and ServletResponse objects so that the servlet container in Chapter 2 can do more. The excitement comes in Chapter 4 when the authors explain how to pool ServletRequest and ServletResponse objects to beef up performance. This topic is not only relevant to Tomcat, but also Java programming in general. Object instantiation is expensive, and one way to avoid it is by reusing objects. However, you must be careful when your application will be used by many clients, as you must then think about thread safety. Chapter 4 elegantly explains how Tomcat developers solve this problem, as well as teach you a general solution for object pooling. Interestingly, a servlet is always represented by a single instance, and the same instance services all incoming requests.

The authors are also patient in explaining everything step by step, until the last chapters where they tackle more difficult problems such as Digester, JMX, class loaders and session management.

Not only will you be good at configuring Tomcat after you are finished reading this, you will also be able to tell straight away what's going on whenever your Tomcat installation throws up some error message. In addition, if you are really serious about Tomcat, you can start thinking of writing your own modules or extending the existing ones. For example, as the authors have demonstrated, you can extend Tomcat's application loader to automatically reload a Struts application when the struts-config.xml is modified, making the application development process quicker.

This book is also great in answering many questions that seasoned servlet/JSP programmers might have long been pondering. For example, this book discusses the difference between an OutputStream and a PrintWriter, and why you can only use one of them rather than both. It also tells you why you cannot write to the request parameters or headers.

Now, as much as I liked it, this book is not perfect. The first noticeable flaw is that there are quite a number of disturbing spelling mistakes. Also, the index could have been better, not to mention a cover that is plain and uninspiring. However, I have to admit I am very happy with this book and will recommend it to any Java programmer.

You can purchase How Tomcat Works from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

harmgsn writes "Following the release of Apache 1.3.32, the Apache Group released Apache 1.3.33 to fix a security flaw in mod_include and in the Content-Length field. The official announcement is available as well as the ChangeLog for the 1.3.x series."

harmgsn writes "Following the release of Apache 1.3.32, the Apache Group released Apache 1.3.33 to fix a security flaw in mod_include and in the Content-Length field. The official announcement is available as well as the ChangeLog for the 1.3.x series."

chipster writes "Apache 1.3.32 has been released. This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. You can read about the new features here, and get Apache 1.3.32 here. Also available is the 1.3 ChangeLog. Additionally, to compliment this release of Apache, mod_ssl- 2.8.21-1.3.32 has also been released."

chipster writes "Apache 1.3.32 has been released. This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. You can read about the new features here, and get Apache 1.3.32 here. Also available is the 1.3 ChangeLog. Additionally, to compliment this release of Apache, mod_ssl- 2.8.21-1.3.32 has also been released."

chipster writes "Apache 1.3.32 has been released. This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. You can read about the new features here, and get Apache 1.3.32 here. Also available is the 1.3 ChangeLog. Additionally, to compliment this release of Apache, mod_ssl- 2.8.21-1.3.32 has also been released."

chipster writes "Apache 1.3.32 has been released. This version of Apache is principally a security and bug fix release. You can read about the new features here, and get Apache 1.3.32 here. Also available is the 1.3 ChangeLog. Additionally, to compliment this release of Apache, mod_ssl- 2.8.21-1.3.32 has also been released."

Orbital Sander writes "Registration is now open for ApacheCon 2004, held on November 15-17 in Las Vegas. The conference features over 65 sessions about topics as diverse as the Apache httpd web server (which drives over 67% of all web sites on the Internet including Slashdot) to the foundation's Web Services projects. The weekend preceding the conference has a program of tutorials, three hour hands-on sessions presented by the finest minds in the Apache community. Wanna rub shoulders with the developers and power users of the Apache software? Registering before October 31 gets you $100 off."

Orbital Sander writes "Registration is now open for ApacheCon 2004, held on November 15-17 in Las Vegas. The conference features over 65 sessions about topics as diverse as the Apache httpd web server (which drives over 67% of all web sites on the Internet including Slashdot) to the foundation's Web Services projects. The weekend preceding the conference has a program of tutorials, three hour hands-on sessions presented by the finest minds in the Apache community. Wanna rub shoulders with the developers and power users of the Apache software? Registering before October 31 gets you $100 off."

JohnA writes "I can't believe this hasn't received more attention than it has, but Caucho Software released their award-winning Java application server Resin under the GPL. This means that you are no longer bound to Tomcat and its less-than-stellar performance when deploying Java-based web apps."

vertigo writes "I am reasonably proficient in C and C++ as well as the more common scripting languages, but i always felt the lack of a sweet spot between the hard and fast low-level programming languages and the loosely typed scripting languages. Lately, my interest in the Mono project has been growing. The C# language appears to offer just that sweet spot between power and productivity I've been looking for, and its class libraries like Gtk# seem to provide the programmer with a very clean and intuitive API." Read on for vertigo's review of Mono: A Developer's Handbook from O'Reilly. Mono: A Developer's Handbook author Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein pages 278 publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc. rating 8 reviewer vertigo ISBN 0596007922 summary An introduction to programming with Mono

When learning a new language such as C#, or working with a new development environment such as Mono, it usually takes some time before you get up to speed in developing programs. Wading through the reference documentation and reading other people's source code often provides much-needed information on how to do certain things. Both, however, are very time consuming and tedious.

Enter Mono: A Developer's Notebook. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters which are thin on theory, but rich on practical content and example code. The featured code snippets are, in contrast to ones in books that teach theory and concepts, not solely designed to illustrate a specific theoretical aspect of programming. Each one is designed to perform a useful task that is essential in day-to-day application programming. What sets this book apart from the multitude of .NET books already available on the market? In order to answer this question it is neccesary to provide a short introduction on Mono.

Mono is essentially an open source cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET development framework and implements the API's which are standardized by ECMA. It is, however, not an exact clone. Besides providing a (partially implemented) stack that provides compatibility with Microsoft's .NET API's, Mono adds a whole new API-stack of its own, consisting of open source technologies such as the Gtk+ toolkit and the Gecko HTML rendering engine. This makes it possible to develop cross-platform applications based on open source technology while (mostly) compiling from a single code-base. In contrast to most .NET books available on the market, which focus primarily on Microsoft's API's in the context of Visual Studio.NET, this book concentrates on the basic ECMA API's and Mono's own open source stack. A complete coverage of .NET and the Mono architecture is outside of this review's scope, so for more information you are advised to check the Mono Project's website.

Before we dive deeper into the content of the book, a short introduction on the Developer's Notebook series by O'Reilly may be useful. The books in this series are styled to resemble the kind of notebooks college students carry around during their classes in which to take notes or, more commonly, draw caricatures of their teachers. The 'notebook' theme persists throughout the look-and-feel of the book. The 278-page thick paperback has a glossy blue cover, complete with faux post-it note and coffee-stains. Inside, the pages are not clean white but lined like the pages found in math notebooks. In the margin, useful comments are scribbled in a font that resembles handwriting. At first I suspected that the 'busy' look would distract from the content, but in practice this was no problem, thanks to the thick black typewriter font in which the bulk of the text is printed.

The chapters in this book are referred to as labs. Each of them focuses on a specific set of tasks and/or features and is divided into several paragraphs. Most paragraphs consist of a number of standard sections following a rigid formula that help you understand a certain aspect of working with Mono. The most common sections are:

• How do I do that?: Often using a liberal amount of practical code, this section shows how to accomplish the task at hand, for example working with files.
• How it works: In this section, the code and concepts involved in the previous section are explained more in depth, step by step.
• What about...: Offers a short focus on more advanced topics or pitfalls.
• Where to learn more: If you are craving more information after reading the previous sections, you are often offered a helping hand on where to find more information, providing url's to relevant documentation such as MSDN and other websites.

The first chapter, Getting Mono Running, describes how to get Mono up and running on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, and how to compile from source on other platforms. The installation instructions for Windows only describe how to install Mono and Gtk#. Integration of Gtk# only in an existing Visual Studio.Net installation falls outside of the scope of the book, but a recent blog entry offers some hints on how to accomplish this. Besides installation, the first chapter offers a short description of the individual tools that make up the mono development. After installation, you will want some kind of editor or IDE to work with. Both the MonoDevelop IDE and several other ways of integrating Mono into your existing environment as a Java or Windows developer are covered. Finally, the community is an important aspect of every open source project. Ways of interacting with the community as well as a guide on how to submit bugs and links to some working Mono/C# applications are part of this chapter.

The C# introduction in the second chapter, Getting Started with C#, is tailored towards people who have at least some proficiency in using an object-oriented language such as C++ or Java. Some differences between C#, Java and C++ are discussed, as well as the differences between value- and reference types, the basics of error handling, working with assemblies and more. Concepts such as classes, methods, inheritance and namespaces are assumed to be known territory. If you have no previous programming experience, Mono: A Developer's Notebook is only useful in combination with a book that teaches programming with C# such as The C# Programming Language by Anders Hejlsberg.

An important part of any modern language is its class libraries. The third chapter, Core .NET, provides an introduction to the standard Framework Library Classes, which describes essential everyday tasks that are part of every program, such as working with files, strings, searching for text patterns and handling collections of data. Besides those basic functions, the chapter also dives deeper into the internals of a compiled assembly, the handling of processes and easy multitasking using threads. Finally, the last paragraph explains how to use a .NET version of the JUnit Java Unit testing framework, Nunit, to test your code.

Developing Gtk-applications with Mono and C# is remarkably easy. Chapter 4, Gtk#, describes the basics of writing Gtk# applications. First, it's neccesary to remark that Gtk# might be a bit of a misnomer. Besides the raw Gtk+ toolkit functionality, Gtk# also includes most of the Gnome libraries like gconf, the gnome canvas, libglade and more. Chapter 4 describes functionality available in the Gtk namespace, the basic Gtk+ toolkit. Gtk+ is a constraints-based toolkit, which means that widgets are not positioned using absolute pixel coordinates but rather on basis of their logical relation to each other. This can be a bit confusing for novices, but this chapter provides a good introduction to the basic principles of writing layouts using Gtk#. The authors provide descriptions of essential operations that almost every application needs, such as creating menus and drawing pixmaps (or more advanced things like using the treeview widget and drag-and-drop), assisted by easy-to-read code snippets.

While chapter 4 introduces basic Gtk# functionality, chapter 5, Advanced Gtk#, delves deeper into more advanced features of the Gtk# library which also include functionality outside of the basic Gtk-namespace, such as the Gnome libraries. Working with Gnome button toolbars, the Glade user interface designer, storing your application settings in Gconf, setting up some preferences through the use of a wizard/druid, asynchronous operations and threading to increase responsiveness of your application while performing background tasks, rendering HTML in your application using the Gecko rendering engine and internationalisation and translation of applications are all described in this chapter.

The use of XML is tightly integrated throughout the Mono framework. It is, for example, the underlying format of the messages that web services use to communicate using the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols. The 6th chapter, Processing XML, describes the XML functionality available in Mono. It starts off by simple operations, reading and writing to an XML-file using relevant examples such as RSS and Dashboard clue-packets. It then proceeds to describe how to modify XML in memory, how to navigate and transform XML using Xpath and XSLT, how to constrain XML in several ways and how to serialize and deserialize objects into and from their XML representation. As in previous chapters, the information density is very high so it might take several reads to grok everything explained. The code examples and accompanying text however are very clear and concise.

The 7th chapter called Networking, Remoting, and Web Services describes the networking functionality available in Mono. The chapter starts off with ASP.NET. Mono's stand-alone XSP webserver and Apache integration with mod_mono are discussed, as well as the basics of writing a web application using ASP.NET's code-behind functionality which enables web applications to completely seperate presentation from the underlying code. Communication using plain tcp/ip, remoting using binary serialized objects and invoking remote procedures using XML-RPC as an alternative to SOAP are also described in this chapter. You might want to encrypt the data you send over the network, so a basic description of the Mono cryptographic API is provided. Finally, a short introduction to database handling using ADO.NET concludes chapter 7.

The 8th and last chapter titled Cutting Edge Mono starts off with an introduction on how to use the GNU Automake, Autoconf and the pkg-config tools to create an easy to build source package of your project. It then proceeds to describe various pitfalls and considerations in case you want to write cross-platform applications using Mono, such as filesystem layout, configuration storage and the calling of native code using p/invoke. A particularly cool project is IKVM, which translates Java bytecode into the Common Intermediate Language bytecode Mono uses. This enables Mono to run Java applications and allows Java and Mono code to inter-operate. A short introduction on the use of IKVM is provided, as well as some code examples on how to call Mono assemblies from Java and use the Java class libraries from within Mono applications. The chapter ends with some other cutting-edge functionality, like how to run a development version of Mono, a preview of the Generics (templates in c++) implementation available as featured in C# 2.0 and how to write Mono programs in Basic.

What is missing? The book doesn't contain a reference section on any of the described API's. If you need detailed information on the C# language specification or an API reference you will need to consult external resources such as the documentation provided with Mono, MSDN, or a separate book covering the topic to make optimal use of the information contained in this book. Fortunately, the book kindly provides pointers on where to find those. The information-density is much higher than you would expect from a book this size. This means the information contained in it is terse. Many topics are treated in a only a couple of pages and the book doesn't take time to explain a lot of programming concepts. The information gets you 'on the road' quickly however, which is exactly what this book is supposed to do.

The strength of this book is that it fills the gap between the earlier-mentioned reference documentation and the need to go out and try to read sourcecode to find out how a particular thing is done. The writing style is clear, concise and neutral. Some topics are clarified by the use of screenshots, which is especially useful in the chapters dealing with Gtk# widgets. All in all, if you are a developer with previous experience in object-oriented programming, Mono: A Developer's Notebook will provide you with an excellent introduction into many of the aspects of working with Mono, its associated libraries and programs.

More information and a sample chapter can be found at the book's homepage.

You can purchase Mono: A Developer's Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

roly writes "Not long after 2.0.51 was released, Apache 2.0.52 has come out. It's primarily a bugfix release, fixing one security flaw that was introduced in 2.0.51. See the release announcement, and the changelog. Download it from a mirror."

roly writes "Not long after 2.0.51 was released, Apache 2.0.52 has come out. It's primarily a bugfix release, fixing one security flaw that was introduced in 2.0.51. See the release announcement, and the changelog. Download it from a mirror."

roly writes "Not long after 2.0.51 was released, Apache 2.0.52 has come out. It's primarily a bugfix release, fixing one security flaw that was introduced in 2.0.51. See the release announcement, and the changelog. Download it from a mirror."

davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"

davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"

davemabe writes "At long last, SpamAssassin 3.0.0 has been released. I've been using the release candidates for a month or so, and the results have been far improved over previous versions. Its use of SURBL along with Bayes auto learning make it seem like this solution is the one to beat. It looks like they've introduced a new logo as well. Snazzy!"

jgarzik writes "IPv6 presents a catch-22: the most popular web sites on the Internet don't have any incentive to switch to IPv6 until a large portion of their userbase is on IPv6, and their user base does not have a large incentive to switch to IPv6 until many of the popular Internet destinations support IPv6. My proposed solution is simple: Configure a proxy server that serves IPv6 requests, passing those requests through to underlying IPv4-only servers that not have yet been transitioned to IPv6. This article describes how to configure Apache's proxy server to fill this role, and suggests a few ideas for use."

Matt Rosenberger writes "Over a month ago, IBM donated the source code to Cloudscape (now dubbed Derby) to the Apache Software Foundation. Last week, the Apache Incubator Project released a snapshot of the source code to Derby. Derby is an open-source embedded database written in Java."

djh101010 writes "apache.org has announced version 2.0.51 of their webserver, which is a bug-fix (rather than a feature) release. There are 5 security vulnerabilities addressed by this release, so if you're using mod_ssl, IPv6, or a couple other things, it's worth taking a look at what was fixed."

cliffwoolley writes "After several years of development, the Apache Portable Runtime, which is the portability library underlying the Apache HTTP Server 2.x, has finally reached its own 1.0.0 release. If you want to write a portable app without the headaches, APR is the way to do it. Grab a copy and check it out. The full announcement is here."