February 2005 Archives

[Update: March 24th: welcome JavaBlogs readers! Note that this blog entry is a month old. I changed my archive format, changing the permalink for my blog entries, and this caused JavaBlogs to pick up and list a bunch of old entries. Sorry!]

The umbrella JSR for Java 6.0 ("Mustang") has just been released. It provides some preliminary details about what we can expect to see in the next major release of Java. Overall, it looks like we've been spoiled by all the great usability features of Java 5.0. This next release is going to be much less dramatic (unless you love XML). These are the "themes" for the release:

Okay, so I was looking at my web server logs to see how many people had looked at the Jude user's guide (see the previous entry), and I noticed an unusual number of 404 errors like this:

61.135.131.236 - - [01/Feb/2005:09:52:40 -0500] 
  "HEAD /abcdefghijklmn.htm HTTP/1.1" 404 0

30 of these in the first two days of February. Another 15 from January 23rd through the end of the month. All are HEAD requests. No GETs or POSTs. And they all come from the 61.135.131 subnet, which is somewhere in China, according to whois.

After more than a year, I have finally released a new version of Jude, my Java documentation browser application. Jude combines the quickref format of Java in a Nutshell, the definitive documentation of javadoc, and the searchability and quick navigation of an online help system.

The latest beta version is 0.98. It now supports Java 5.0 syntax. And it runs on Mac OS X. The application architecture has been completely overhauled. Jude is no longer a XUL interface wrapped around an applet. It is now a web server, which means that installation is now much easier. Just start it up and point your browser to it.

Read more about Jude, or download it and try it out here.

If you've tried Jude in the past, you may want to give it another try; it has improved over the last year!