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The all-volunteer Apache Software Foundation (ASF) develops, stewards, and incubates nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, many of which power mission-critical applications in financial services, aerospace, publishing, government, healthcare, research, infrastructure, and more.

Did you know that 50% of the Top 10 downloaded Open Source products are Apache projects?

Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built using Apache?

We are pleased to showcase Apache Pivot, the full-featured, professional-grade Java development platform for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Quick peek: RIAs are distributed Web applications that are delivered via site-specific browsers, plug-ins, sandboxes, or virtual machines. Apache Pivot provides a foundation upon which sophisticated and engaging applications can be easily built and deployed over the Web. Pivot combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform, leveraging its comprehensive feature set and extensive industry support.

Background: initially developed at VMWare, Pivot was accepted into the Apache Incubator in January 2009 and graduated as an Apache Top-Level Project in December 2009.

Why Pivot: Like other RIA platforms, Pivot includes features that make building modern GUI applications easier, including:

- An XML-based markup language for declaring the structure of a user interface
- Stylable themes (aka “skins”)
- Data binding
- Animated effects and transitions
- Web Services integration

Pivot is the only RIA framework that allows developers to build applications for the Java plugin using Java or any other JVM-compatible language, such as JavaScript, Groovy, or Scala. Pivot is also the only truly open RIA framework: it is completely Open Source, and is driven entirely by the software development community.

Pivot allows developers to build applications using languages, tools, and APIs they already know, reducing technology sprawl and streamlining solution techonlogy stacks.

What’s under the hood: Pivot 1.5 improves the overall application development experience through

- Expanded Data binding across a much larger collection of components and properties, as well as BindType enum to allow a caller to control the bind direction (load, store, or both).

- New Pub/Sub (publish/subscribe) API to facilitate decoupled messaging within a Pivot application.

- New SuggestionPopup component to simplify the task of adding “auto-complete” or “lookup” functionality to a TextInput and to provide “combo box”-like behavior in an application.

- Overhauled Form improvements, including more prominent flagged fields and flag icons more consistent with the overall Pivot look and feel.

- Improved Text rendering by Pivot components to be consistent with natively rendered text.

- Improved Bindable interface that simplifies WTKX and Java code integration, including a Resources argument to the initialize() method to provide the caller with access to the resource bundle used to load the WTKX file.

- Enhanced look and feel such as tab and Push button-like components (PushButton, ListButton, CalendarButton, etc.) with slightly rounded corners and bevel consistency.

- Streamlined QueryServlet API which is more consistent with Web query client API, making it easier to write Pivot applications that provide and take advantage of REST-based Web Services.

- New ResultList class (org.apache.pivot.sql.ResultList) added to simplify the task of returning JDBC result data from a Web query, and to transform SQL a result set into a JSON or CSV response without the need for any intermediary transformation (the data is transformed on the fly as it is read from the database).

- New FileSerializer to simplify the task of writing file upload applications in Pivot.

Latest release: Apache Pivot 1.5 on 4 June 2010 under the Apache License v.2.0.

Downloads, documentation, examples, and more information: visit http://pivot.apache.org/ .

# # #

The Apache JMeter team announces the availability of Apache JMeter 2.4 r961953.

This is a new release which corrects a lot of bugs and adds many new features.

JMeter 2.4 requires Java 1.5 or later to run.

== All users are recommended to upgrade. ==

Apache JMeter is a Java application designed to test server applications.
It can be used to:
* generate test loads
* test functional behaviour
* measure performance.
It includes support for protocols such as HTTP(S), JDBC, JMS, FTP, and others.
It can also be extended with user-written code.

See http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

The release can be downloaded from:

http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_jmeter.cgi

When downloading, please verify signatures using the KEYS file.

Only the binary archive is needed to run JMeter – there is no need to
download the source archive.

However there are some optional libraries which are not included.
See the “Getting Started” page for details:

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/usermanual/get-started.html

The list of changes since version 2.3.4 can be found at:

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/changes.html

All users are recommended to upgrade to this release.

Enjoy!
The JMeter team

Hello,

Apache CouchDB 1.0.0 has been released and is available for download:

http://couchdb.apache.org/downloads.html

This is a huge milestone for the CouchDB community, and we’d like to thank every single person who’s helped us get this far. This project would be nothing without its community, and we are fortunate enough to be blessed with a very healthy one.

Changes in this release:

* More efficient header commits.
* Use O_APPEND to save lseeks.
* Faster implementation of pread_iolist(). Further improves performance on
concurrent reads.
* Added authentication caching
* Faster default view collation.
* Added option to include update_seq in view responses.

This builds on the changes made in 0.11.1, also released today.

Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests. There are myriad third-party client libraries that make this even easier from your programming language of choice. CouchDB’s built in Web administration console speaks directly to the database using HTTP requests issued from your browser.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, a robust functional programming language ideal for building concurrent distributed systems. Erlang allows for a flexible design that is easily scalable and readily extensible.

Relax and prosper,

N