Developer Break: CMIS, Spring, R, jEdit, Hadoop, and VNC over GIF

Catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to posts. In this edition: CMIS 1.1 approved, Spring 4.0 milestone, new R, jEdit 5.1 previewed, Hadoop for Windows, AMQP for Azure, CoFluent 5.0, and VNC over GIF.

Standards

• The latest version of CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Services specification designed to allow CMS systems and clients to interoperate, has been approved by the technical committee at OASIS. The new CMIS 1.1 specification adds browser binding, type mutability, an "Item" type and bulk updates. Alfresco's Jeff Potts summarises what's new in 1.1.

Open source languages and tools

• Initial support for Java SE 8 / Open JDK 8, JMS 2.0, JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1 and JSR-236 (concurrency) is available in the first milestone towards Spring Framework 4.0. Together with this release, the Spring team has also provided version 3.2.3 of the application framework to fix several recently discovered bugs and integrate runtime support for OpenJDK 8.

• With R 3.0.1, a new version of the R programming language has now become available. The developers have added, for example, arguments to chooseCRANmirror(), load() and mcparallel, as well as warnings to scan().

• A preview of jEdit 5.1 provides a first impression of the upcoming version's new features. For instance, a new plugin management option will help users find and disable plugins that are out of date.

Services and SDKs

• Hortonworks has announced the general availability of a Hadoop platform for Windows. The company says that the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) for Windows is the only distribution that allows Hadoop applications to be executed natively on Windows and Linux servers.

• The Windows Azure Service Bus now supports the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). The protocol defines a portable data representation that allows, for example, messages that are sent to the Service Bus from a .NET program to be read from a Java program or Python script without causing any of the message structure or content to be lost.

Tools

• Intel CoFluent Studio 5.0 is now available to download. The environment serves for modelling and simulating complex electronic systems.

Interesting

• Ever wanted to be able to send VNC screen sharing data as an animated GIF image? Andrey Sidorov was inspired to do just that and created vnc-over-gif, a node.js application which brings together the node-gif and node-rfb libraries so that even an IE6 browser with no plugins can view a VNC session.

(djwm)