The Apache Software Foundation

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

The Apache PhotArk team is pleased to announce the release of Apache PhotArk M1-incubating.

Apache PhotArk will be a complete open source photo gallery application including a content repository for the images, a display piece, an access control layer, and upload capabilities. The idea is to have a rigid design for the content repository with a very flexible display piece. The images in the content repository will be protected with granular access control.

PhotArk gallery currently allows you define a set of albums hosted locally, and also allows you to aggregate external albums exposed as feeds (e.g from Flickr or Picassa web) and provides a default web UI for album navigation.

For full details about the release and to download the distributions please go to:

http://incubator.apache.org/photark/downloads.html

Apache PhotArk welcomes your help. Any contribution, including code, testing, contributions to the documentation, or bug reporting is always appreciated. For more information on how to get involved in
Apache PhotArk visit the website at:

http://incubator.apache.org/photark/

Thank you for your interest in Apache PhotArk!

The Apache PhotArk Team.

--
Luciano Resende
http://people.apache.org/~lresende
http://lresende.blogspot.com/

Hello Lucene users,

On behalf of the Lucene dev community (a growing community far larger than just the committers) I would like to announce the release of Lucene 2.9.

While we generally try and maintain full backwards compatibility between major versions, Lucene 2.9 has a variety of breaks that are spelled out in the 'Changes in backwards compatibility policy' section
of CHANGES.txt.

We recommend that you recompile your application with Lucene 2.9 rather than attempting to “drop” it in. This will alert you to any issues you may have to fix if you are affected by one of the backward
compatibility breaks. As always, its a really good idea to thoroughly read CHANGES.txt before upgrading.

Lucene 2.9 comes with a bevy of new features, including:

 * Per segment searching and caching (can lead to much faster reopen among other things)

 * Near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter

 * New Query types

 * Smarter, more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc)

 * A freshly optimized Collector/Scorer API

 * Improved Unicode support and the addition of Collation contrib

 * A new Attribute based TokenStream API

 * A new QueryParser framework in contrib with a core QueryParser replacement impl included.

 * Scoring is now optional when sorting by Field, or using a custom Collector, gaining sizable performance when scores are not required.

 * New analyzers (PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer, SmartChineseAnalyzer)

 * New fast-vector-highlighter for large documents

 * Lucene now includes high-performance handling of numeric fields.
   Such fields are indexed with a trie structure, enabling simple to use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.

 ---

And many, many more features, bug fixes, optimizations, and various improvements. You can find the full list of changes here:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Changes.html

Many changes have also occurred in Lucene's Contrib area:

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_9_0/changes/Contrib-Changes.html

Binary and source distributions are available at
http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/java/

Lucene artifacts are also available in the Maven2 repository at
http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/lucene/

The Next Release:

The next release will be Lucene 3.0. This should come along shortly, and will remove all of the deprecated code in Lucene 2.9. Lucene 3.0 will also be the first release to move from Java 1.4 to Java 1.5 as a requirement.

Thanks,

Mark Miller

Apache Portable Runtime 1.3.9 Released

  The Apache Software Foundation and the Apache Portable Runtime Project are proud to announce the General Availability of version 1.3.9 of the APR Apache Portable Runtime library, and version 1.3.9 of the companion APR-util Apache Portable Utility library.

  The corresponding version 1.2.1 of the companion APR-iconv library, an alternative portable implementation of the 'iconv' library, remains current.

  APR is available for download from:

    http://apr.apache.org/download.cgi

  This version of APR is primarily a bug fix release, including fixes for specific platforms' configuration, feature detection, and run time behavior.  Most developers and users are encouraged to adopt the latest APR 1.x version to ensure the most comprehensive support and access to the latest features and enhancements.

  Note that the APR library release 1.3.8 introduced security fixes, users of prior versions are strongly cautioned to upgrade to a later release.

  The mission of the Apache Portable Runtime Project is to create and maintain software libraries that provide a predictable and consistent interface to underlying platform-specific implementations. The primary goal is to provide an API to which software developers may code and be assured of predictable
  if not identical behavior regardless of the platform on which their software is built, relieving them of the need to code special-case conditions to work around or take advantage of platform-specific deficiencies or features.

  APR and its companion libraries are implemented entirely in C and provide a common programming interface across a wide variety of operating system platforms without sacrificing performance.
  Currently supported platforms include:

    UNIX variants
    Windows
    Netware
    Mac OS X
    OS/2

  To give a brief overview, the primary core subsystems of APR 1.3 include the following:

    Atomic operations
    Dynamic Shared Object loading
    File I/O
    Locks (mutexes, condition variables, etc)
    Memory management (high performance allocators)
    Memory-mapped files
    Multicast Sockets
    Network I/O
    Shared memory
    Thread and Process management
    Various data structures (tables, hashes, priority queues, etc)

  For a more complete list, please refer to the following URLs:

    http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr/modules.html
    http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/modules.html

  Users of APR 0.9 should be aware that migrating to the APR 1.x programming interfaces may require some adjustments; APR 1.x is neither source nor binary compatible with earlier APR 0.9 releases.
  Users of APR 1.x can expect consistent interfaces and binary backwards compatibility throughout the entire APR 1.x release cycle, as defined in our versioning rules:

    http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html

  APR is already used extensively by the Apache HTTP Server version 2 and the Subversion revision control system, to name but a few.  We list all known projects using APR at   http://apr.apache.org/projects.html -- so please let us know if you find our libraries useful in your own projects!