The Apache Software Foundation

The Felix team is pleased to announce the release of Felix Karaf version 1.0.0

This release along with the associated release notes and change log are available from
 http://felix.apache.org/site/karaf-100.html

Apache Felix Karaf is a small OSGi based runtime which provides a lightweight container onto which various components and applications can be deployed.

Karaf features:

  *  Hot deployment: Karaf supports hot deployment of OSGi bundles by monitoring jar files inside the [home]/deploy directory. Each time a jar is copied in this folder, it will be installed inside the runtime. You can then update or delete it and changes will be handled automatically. In addition, the Karaf also supports exploded bundles and custom deployers (blueprint and spring ones are included by
default).

  * Dynamic configuration: Services are usually configured through the ConfigurationAdmin OSGi service. Such configuration can be defined in Karaf using property files inside the [home]/etc directory. These configurations are monitored and changes on the properties files will be propagated to the services.

  * Logging System: using a centralized logging back end supported by Log4J, Karaf supports a number of different APIs (JDK 1.4, JCL, SLF4J, Avalon, Tomcat, OSGi)

  * Provisioning: Provisioning of libraries or applications can be done through a number of different ways, by which they will be downloaded locally, installed and started.

  * Native OS integration: Karaf can be integrated into your own Operating System as a service so that the lifecycle will be bound to your Operating System.

  * Extensible Shell console: Karaf features a nice text console where you can manage the services, install new applications or libraries and manage their state. This shell is easily extensible by
deploying new commands dynamically along with new features or applications.

  * Remote access: use any SSH client to connect to Karaf and issue commands in the console

  * Security framework based on JAAS

  * Managing instances: Karaf provides simple commands for managing multiple instances. You can easily create, delete, start and stop instances of Karaf through the console.

  * Supports the latest OSGi 4.2 containers: Apache Felix Framework 2.0.0 and Eclipse Equinox 3.5

Enjoy!

-The Felix team

The Apache POI team is pleased to announce the availability of POI 3.5.

 Apache POI is well-known in the Java field as a library for reading and writing Microsoft Office file formats, such as Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Word. With POI 3.5, it supports the new OOXML (Office Open XML) formats introduced in Office 2007. See http://poi.apache.org/ for more details

Release Highlights:

 POI-SS - Java API To Access Microsoft Excel Format Files
 * This common interface allows access to HSSF (binary file format, .xls) and XSSF (ooxml file format, .xlsx) in the same way

 POI-XSSF - Java API To Access Microsoft Excel 2007 OOXML Format Files
 * full implementation of high level POI-SS interface
 * text and embedded data extraction supported
 * low level, low memory parsing supported
 * full support for formula evaluation

 POI-XWPF - Java API To Access Microsoft Word 2007 OOXML File Formats
 * text and embedded data  extraction supported
 * partial implementation of high level usermodel API
 * partial support for custom XML mappings

 POI-XSLF - Java API To Access Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 OOXML Format Files
 * text and embedded data  extraction supported

In addition, POI 3.5 includes many new features, bug fixes and optimizations over POI 3.2.
 You can find the full list of changes here: http://poi.apache.org/changes.html

 The source and binaries can be downloaded from your local mirror:
 http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/poi/release/

 The release is also available from the central Maven repository under Group ID "org.apache.poi" and Version "3.5-FINAL".

 For the Apache POI Team
 Yegor Kozlov

The Empire-db team is pleased to announce the release of Apache Empire-db version 2.0.5.

Apache Empire-db is a lightweight data access and persistence component for relational databases based on JDBC.
http://incubator.apache.org/empire-db/

The most important improvement over our previous 2.0.4 release is the shift to Maven project management.
Hence Empire-db is now available from the Maven repository using the following group and artifact ids:
groupId:        org.apache.empire-db
artifacts:      empire-db, empire-db-struts2
version:        2.0.5-incubating

Further improvements include:
- New database handlers for Apache Derby, H2, PostgreSQL
- New Examples showing WebService integration using Apache CXF
- Struts2 extensions upgraded to work with Struts 2.1.6.

To download Apache Empire-db 2.0.5. please visit our download page on:
http://incubator.apache.org/empire-db/downloads/latest.htm

The following list provides a complete list of issues resolved in this release:

The issues are categorized as follows:
[{C=Core}|{S=Struts Extensions}|{E=Examples}|{O=Other}
/{N=New Feature}|{B=Bug fix}|{I=Improvement}]

Issues resolved:
EMPIREDB-49 - [C/B]: The generation of table, view and query aliases now uses thread-safe counters
EMPIREDB-46 - [C/B]: datetime-phrase issue in DBDatabaseDriverDerby
EMPIREDB-45 - [S/I]: Update struts extentions to accomodate latest struts release
EMPIREDB-44 - [C/B]: error using apache derby and CLOB datatype
EMPIREDB-42 - [C/I]: Extend DBReader to provide query results in a hash set

EMPIREDB-41 - [C/I]: Deal with databases differences regarding SQL reverse function
EMPIREDB-40 - [C/B]: Postgresql cast problem
EMPIREDB-37 - [C/N]: PostgreSQL "BLOB" type not exist but is possible to create a "bytea" column
EMPIREDB-36 - [E/N]: New WebServices integration example using Apache CXF
EMPIREDB-34 - [C/I]: Add support for stmt.executeUpdate with Statement.RETURN_GENERATED_KEYS instead of getPostInsertAutoIncValue()
EMPIREDB-33 - [S/B]: BeanRecordProxy isFieldReadOnly wrong for new records
EMPIREDB-32 - [C/N]: Unit tests
EMPIREDB-31 - [E/B]: Advanced sample throws SQLException (wrong db user)
EMPIREDB-30 - [C/N]: Support for PostgeSQL
EMPIREDB-29 - [O/N]: Switch to Maven project management
EMPIREDB-28 - [E/B]: SampleConfig in the demo application has invalid user
EMPIREDB-27 - [C/B]: HSQLDB driver doesn't support conversion of value to DOUBLE
EMPIREDB-26 - [S/I]: Extend HTMLTagDictionary to allow default cssClass for all input types
EMPIREDB-25 - [C/I]: Implement getAttribute and setAttribute on BeanProperty class
EMPIREDB-24 - [S/I]: Allow textarea to handle keypress and keyup events in order to check the maximum length of input
EMPIREDB-23 - [C/B]: Maximum size is not passed to error message handler for DBErrors.FieldValueTooLong in DBTableColumn::checkValue
EMPIREDB-22 - [C/B]: deleteReferenceRecords() does not sort the depending records by id
EMPIREDB-21 - [S/I]: Allow empty record item parameter: The function getRecordKeyFromString should return null if the item string consists of the new item flag only.
EMPIREDB-20 - [C/B]: Convert to char doesn't work for hsqldb
EMPIREDB-19 - [S/B]: The form tag's "target" attribute is not rendered in HTML code
EMPIREDB-18 - [C/B]: DBRecord.setModified(column, isModified) doesn't set the record state back from modified to valid
EMPIREDB-17 - [S/B]: Checked attribute does not work on radio button tag.
EMPIREDB-16 - [S/I]: Tag library definition does not allow java expressions for the cssClass attribute
EMPIREDB-15 - [C/B]: Record fields are not cleared properly by createRecord.

EMPIREDB-14 - [S/I]: Allow javascript code on anchors

For further information about issues see
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/EMPIREDB