Blogging Techstacks

Apache Tomcat 7.0.23 Released

Over the long U.S. holiday weekend, the Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.23.  The changelog lists mostly bug fixes but there are some new features in this release that are geared towards increasing startup times for applications.  A summary (taken from the release announcement) of these new features follows:

• The ability to start and stop child containers (primarily Contexts: i.e. web applications) in parallel which can significantly improve start times. This is disabled by default but can be enabled by setting the startStopThreads attribute of a Host to a value greater than one.
• Cache the results of parsing the global and host level context.xml files to improve start times.
• Improve the handling of failed deployments so that a broken application can be fixed (e.g. via JMX) and another attempt made to start it rather than it having to be removed.

Download a copy of tomcat 7.0.23 from a mirror near you!

Gaelyk 1.1 Released

Earlier today, Guillaume Laforge announced that Gaelyk 1.1 was out. Below are highlights of this version, (which was copied from the release announcement):

• Upgraded to Groovy 1.8.4 and App Engine SDK 1.6.0
• The new get() methods on the datastore service now also work with the asynchronous datastore.
• Added an unindexed property on entities to set unindexed properties: person.unindexed.bio = "..."
• Three annotations to customize the bean / entity coercion (@Key, @Unindexed and @Ignore)
• Part of the work with the async datastore get(), whenever you have a Future to deal with, for example when the async datastore returns a Future, you can call any property on the Future object, and it will proxy those property access to the underlying object returned by the get() call on the future.
• In addition to datastore.query{} and datastore.execute{}, there is now a datastore.iterate{} method that returns an Iterator instead of a list, which is friendlier when your queries return a large number of results.
• Added the prospective search service to the binding
• You can access the asynchronous Memcache service with memcache.async
• Additional convenience methods for the file service
• Added an each and collect method on blobstore to iterate over all the blobs from the blobstore, or to collect some values from all blob infos stored.

The Gaelyk project website has the latest binaries and documentation. Congratulations to the project team on the release!

DigiCert is not Digicert

Poor DigiCert.  I am really starting to feel sorry for them.  First, there was a lot of search engine confusion over whether there was a link between DigiNotar's recent breach and DigiCert. (There isn't)  Now, there is news that a Malaysian firm named Digicert Sdn Bhd has had to revoke some of its root certificates due to successful reverse engineering of keys.  Here's the press release from DigiCert Inc., which states there is no affiliation between these two firms.

So, to recap, DigiCert Inc., a Certificate Authority that uses "digicert" in its logo and using web site address "www.digicert.com" has no affiliation with Digicert Sdn Bhd, who is a Certificate Authority who also appears to be using "digicert" it its logo and uses web site address "www.digicert.com.my".