IntelliJ IDEA 4.5 was released a few days ago. For those of you that haven’t used it: IDEA is a truly awesome IDE - lightweight and quick, extremely intuitive and smart, and with great refactoring features, as well as solid integration with external tools such as Ant, JUnit, and various source control systems. It is an IDE for programmers that actually want to work with code, without wizards and other bloat....
I have recently had a chance to look into several XML object binding frameworks, including JAXB, Castor, and JiBX. As usual, each framework has its strengths and its weaknesses. I should add that our requirements are pretty special, as the classes that are bound to XML will form part of an SDK and therefore need to be clean, follow Java conventions, and contain good Javadocs that describe the XML properties that they are mapped to....
The Eclipse Project has released the final version 3.0 of the popular Eclipse IDE. I am currently IntelliJ IDEA and I still very much love this IDE (even though I’m still stuck with version 3.0.5), but Eclipse 2.1 looked very promising when I played with it briefly a while ago, and I am sure that Eclipse 3.0 will be even better. With a great open source IDE like Eclipse and the excellent (and unfortunately not free but at least reasonably-priced) IntelliJ IDEA, the big, bloated, and expensive IDEs such as JBuilder should be in a lot of trouble…
Sun has decided to rename J2SE 1.5 to J2SE 5.0, as this is a very significant relase with important changes to the Java platform. According to this The Server Side posting, Sun also considered getting rid of the “2” and going with J5SE instead, but this was not a good choice because of the J2EE brand. I think Sun made a bad decision when they released J2SE 1.2, the first Java 2 release....
O’Reilly has produced an interesting poster about the History of Programming Languages. But beware: the PDF file is 39" wide, probably because it covers every minor version of every programming languages, rather than just important milestones. Apparently you can also get a printed version of the poster for free when you order two books from O’Reilly. There’s also a corresponding Wiki, and of course a lively Slashdot discussion. Would you have thought that there are over 2500 documented programming languages?...