Developer Break: Ruby, Kepler, eXo, Derby, Sirius, Karaf and Lazarus

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Ruby 1.8.7 EOL, Eclipse Kepler milestone, eXo goes LGPL, Derby approaching, Eclipse Sirius proposed, Apache Karaf technology preview, new Dart editor, and fixes for Lazarus.

• Ruby developers who use Ruby 1.8.7 are reminded that the developers will be declaring end of life on that version in 90 days.

• Milestone 6 of Eclipse Kepler is available and now offers a migration wizard for use in shared installs, a quick fix for != and SWT enhancements like bidirectional text on buttons.

• A beta version of the community edition of the enterprise-scale social collaboration system eXo Platform 4.0 has been released. One announced change is that the platform is now licensed under the LGPL.

• A new release of Apache Derby, 10.10, is approaching – the draft release notes note new features such as unencrypted databases, JDBC 4.2 support and the ability to run on the small device profile of Java 8. If all goes to plan, the final release should come in April.

• A proposal to the Eclipse Foundation sets out to create Eclipse Sirius, a new project which builds on existing development work to create a system that provides modelling editors and workbenches based on definitions in the modelling stack.

• The Apache Karaf project has released a first release candidate for version 3.0.0 of the OSGi kernel. This technology preview includes support for SSH public key authentication and agent forwarding with authentication, scp, sub-shells and a less command among its many enhancements.

• The Dart Editor has had a significant release. The developers have also brought back support for the "+" operator to concatenate strings. There's also a new analyser, new ways of handling preferences, and lower memory usage.

• The free Pascal implementation Lazarus has been updated to version 1.0.8 with many bugfixes.

(djwm)