Developer Break: Doctrine, GCC, Linux OpenGL, Spring

Developer Break – catching the smaller but important changes and updates to tools and specifications, utilities and libraries: this week: Ajax Control Toolkit, Doctrine, EMF Compare, GCC, Linux OpenGL, Spring, Scala.

• The September 2012 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit is, apparently, the first to support version 4.5 of the .NET framework. The BSD-licensed library continues to support ASP.NET 3.5 and 4.0 and includes "several important bug fixes".

• Version 2.3 of Doctrine, the PHP Object Relational Mapper, was released with many little optimisations.

• If you need to compare models in the Eclipse Modelling Framework, version 2.0 of EMF Compare has been released. The new version is an overhaul of the project and so existing users should look out for changes in the API.

• The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has moved on to version 4.7.2 with 70 fixes for serious bugs and regressions found in previous releases.

• Discussions are taking place on a proposal for an updated Linux OpenGL ABI. The current version is now twelve years old and has some major shortcomings, such as not allowing multiple vendor versions to coexist on the same filesystem.

• Spring Framework 3.2 has reached its second milestone, bringing completed asynchronous controllers, REST content negotiation and an improved Spring Expression Language. SpringSource encourages testers to try the new milestone with Java 7 as full compatibility will be a key feature of the next release.

• Telerik's Test Studio for Windows has received its second release of 2012; R2 2012 includes full support for recording and execution on Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, Visual Studio 2012 integration and a reporting dashboard.

• ZeroTurnaround has published a report which offers a technical review of the Scala language's pros and cons, warnings about things that are dangerous for newcomers and practices that newcomers should adopt while using Scala, and includes an interview with Scala creator Martin Odersky.

(djwm)