Developer Break: Derby, MRUnit, Wicket, Subversion and more...

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Derby does JDBC 4.2, MRUnit for Hadoop testing, Wicket does web fonts, OpenNLP commanded, Subversion updates, Ext JS rethemed, Beignet does OpenCL, Mobile AWS mobilised, Engine Yard goes PHP and a Perl QA Hackathon.

Open source libraries and tools

• Apache Derby 10.10.1.1 now supports version 4.2 of JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) and works with the small CP2 profile of Java 8.

• Version 1.0 of Apache MRUnit has arrived. It is a Java library for writing unit tests for Apache Hadoop MapReduce jobs. The new version is the first release since the library became a full Apache project.

• Also at Apache, the Wicket web application framework developers released Wicket 6.7.0 adding support for webfonts and the ability to render pages into strings so they can be sent as HTML emails.

• And if you are processing natural language, Apache OpenNLP was updated to version 1.5.3 with improvements such as a better CLI, new tools and better documentation.

• Subversion 1.7.9 and 1.6.21 are the latest two releases of the version management system that mainly offer bug fixes.

• Version 4.2 of the Ext JS JavaScript library introduces the new Neptune theme and improves the support of right-to-left languages. It also appears to improve rendering.

• The OpenCL SDK for Linux and Windows that was recently released by Intel is proprietary and seems to be rather restricted under Linux. Thankfully, a first release of the Beignet open source project has now become available. Beignet is designed to offer OpenCL support on Intel platforms. However, the GPU options are currently only accessible on Ivy Bridge processors

Services and SDKs

• Amazon has released version 1.5 of the AWS Mobile SDKs (iOS/Android). The SDKs contain updates for "Local Secondary Indexes" in DynamoDB, various bug fixes, and individual service frameworks on iOS.

• Running PHP applications on the Engine Yard Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is now possible on an trial "Early Access" basis.

Trends and Events

• This year's annual Perl QA Hackathon was held in Lancaster from 11 to 14 April. The "Achievements" section offers an interesting summary of the results .

(djwm)