The release step will go as follows.

We won’t have a proper release until the new documentation can be included. There is still work to be done here: finish the migration to reST, add building tools support and have the users community provide fixes, enhancements and updates.

There are however many changes ready to be used from the SVN trunk, hence we will publish preview releases meanwhile, so that adventurous users can start to use them.

If everything goes as planned, the first preview release (3.11.0-beta1) will be available on november 30th.

MySQL is going to integrate some code from Google customizations. That is extremely good and healthy, however I came across a paragraph that made me wonder if MySQL will ever stop being insane at times…

Oracle having acquired the vendor of MySQL main data storage subsystem (InnoDB), the company decided to write a new one called Falcon. This is a safe move as it could potentially threaten MySQL if Oracle decided not to play nice anymore regarding InnoDB.

However… read this:

Falcon will do crash recovery and roll-back operations faster than InnoDB because they are done from main memory, Schumacher said, but some InnoDB features, like foreign key support and full-text indexing, won’t be supported until MySQL 6.1.

Come on! How can you pretend making an enterprise-grade RDBMS and not support foreign keys? Just remember that MySQL only started to support them in version 5… I think I’ll never understand why MySQL is so bitchy about foreign keys while any other RDBMS just provides it (PostgreSQL, Firebird or Derby just do it right).

If you don’t have basic referential integrity, then please don’t call it a RDBMS: just call it a “table-based database” with SQL support.

My good Japan-bound friend Olivier just pinged me about GSN which is another IzPack-powered project.

GSN is a middleware for sensor networks:

GSN is a software middleware designed to facilitate the deployment and programming of sensor networks.

Using GSN, now you can leave all the nifty sensor network details behind and focus only on the high level application logic. Thanks to GSN’s open API, you can quickly write sensor network applications by leaving the tedious task of managing low level hardware dependent details to GSN.

If your project is also using IzPack and we don’t know about it, feel free to ping me as well

I didn’t knew that before I tried the software myself, but one of the XWiki Enterprise downloads is actually an IzPack software installer!

Thanks to the XWiki team for using IzPack (and they are also french)

I had always wondered why on earth we had to add the -Xmx256m flag to the JVM to launch the Glassfish installer…

It’s as simple as that: everything is packed inside one class file which contains the installer code as well as the data.

Is there any good reason for doing so? I would find it more intuitive to have at least the data separated from the installer classes, so that it could be launched graphically (Windows, Mac OS X) or even from a terminal… using only java -jar glassfish-installer-XXX.jar.

(Just for the sake of clarity, I don’t care that Glassfish is not using IzPack )