The Codehaus XFire team is proud to announce their 1.0 release! XFire is an open source Java SOAP framework built on a high performance, streaming XML model. XFire includes support for web service standards, an easy to use API, Spring integration, JBI support, and plugable bindings for POJOs, JAXB, and XMLBeans.

Find out more information by downloading it yourself or viewing the user's guide.

XFire 1.0 features include:

• Support for WSDL 1.1, SOAP 1.1 and 1.2, WS-Addressing, WS-I Basic Profile 1.1
• Pluggable bindings for POJOs, XMLBeans, JAXB 1.1, JAXB 2.0, and Castor support
• Support for many different transports - HTTP, JMS, XMPP, In-JVM, etc.
• Spring, Pico, Plexus, Loom, and Yan support
• Embeddable and Intuitive API
• Client and server stub generation
• JSR 181 2.0 API to configure services via Java 5 and 1.4 (Commons attributes JSR 181 syntax)

The XFire team is proud to announce the 1.0-RC1 release! XFire is a next-generation java SOAP framework. XFire makes service oriented development approachable through its easy to use API and support for standards. It is also highly performant since it is built on a low memory StAX based model.

This release features many improvements:

• Improved Client and Server stub generation
• Performance Improvements of up to 50%!
• JAX-WS Early Access Release
• Castor Support
• Maven 2 Support
• Many, many bug fixes

See the download page or the release notes for more information.

The mevenide team is proud to announce the final version of Maven1 support for Netbeans IDE. The released set of Netbeans modules allows to work with Maven1 projects in the IDE, without imports or additional configurations. See the complete list of features and list of bugfixes since the last release (0.9).

Download 1.0 release binaries. Those already using previous releases can easily update through the Netbeans Update Center.

Neptune is a build tool with similar scope as Ant. There are two major differences between Neptune and Ant:

1. Neptune is based on command pattern. The Command interface allows an Object as return value, while Ant Task has no return value. The only way in Ant for a Task to communicate with other Task or the execution engine is through system property values, which are essentially string-only global variables.

2. Neptune is currently supported by the Jaskell scripting language, which allows flexible combinations of Neptune Command objects. Function, higher-order funciton, monadic combinators can all be used to reuse code and combine Command objects. While Ant is based on XML, which is not an ideal language for expressing logic.

Neptune currently delegates to Ant for most atomic tasks. All Ant core and optional tasks are adapted as Neptune commands with exactly the same set of properties and sub-elements as in Ant.

This means knowledge of Ant tasks can be reused in Neptune. All one has to do in order to call an Ant task in Neptune is:
1. check out the Ant manual for the supported properties and sub-elements.
2. call the ant task from within neptune with a different syntax. (not xml, but a neptune script)

A shell is provided to allow executing Neptune commands and Ant tasks interactively.

Please refer to http://jaskell.codehaus.org/Using+Neptune for details.

Jaskell is a lazy functional scripting language that runs in Java platform.

Function currying, higher-order function and monadic combinators are supported.

In addition to functional features, Object Oriented flavor is supported by the language as well. Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism and Mixin can all be done in a consistent and intuitive manner.

With monadic combinator and the highly tailorable interpreter, the language runtime can be customized as a domain specific language that addresses certain domain logic in intuitive syntax. As an example, Neptune uses a customized jaskell runtime that addresses build logic.

Jaskell is seamlessly integrated with Java in the following ways:
1. Jaskell runs in jvm.
2. Jaskell expression evaluates to a java Object.
3. Jaskell interpreter is a java library that can be configured and invoked from within java.
4. Java methods can be invoked from within Jaskell code.

A Shell is also provided to evaluate jaskell expression including java statements interactively.

Please refer to http://jaskell.codehaus.org/ for details.

The Penrose team is proud to announce the 0.9.9 release. Penrose is virtual directory server. Unlike a traditional directory server, virtual directory does not master the data itself in its own database. Instead a virtual directory will dynamically translate requests it receives to operations in other protocols or data models, such as to a relational database. It comes with Penrose Studio, a GUI-based administration and mapping tool based on eclipse RCP 3.1 platform. Check-out Penrose Studio flash demo here.

Highlights include:
Polling Connectors
Penrose Studio improvement
Embedding Penrose is now easier than ever
Various bug fixes and performance enhancements.

You can find more information in the release notes.