JTS 1.12 released

JTS 1.12 has been released, and is now available for download at SourceForge.

Some highlights of this release include:

• Single-Sided Buffers
• MinimumClearance function
• nearestNeighbours methods for STRtree
• Vector2D class for vector operations
• DD (DoubleDouble) enhanced precision arithmetic
  
• improved robustness for Delaunay and Voronoi computation
• enhanced geometry digitization in the TestBuilder, along with a dynamic grid

... along with many other features, enhancements and fixes.

Single-Sided Buffer

Apple walls getting higher

ZDNet has an interesting long view on the Apple iCloud announcement. Money quote:

The mobile world is moving away from the chock-full-o’-content web and increasingly becoming a world of closed pipes of content, with Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft regulating the flow. Tech fiefdoms scattered across a vast open land have expanded into warring nation-states with adjacent borders. The Mac vs. PC vs. Linux argument from the early days of consumer computing has lost a great deal of its luster in recent years with the development of cloud computing on the open web, but the concept of platform wars is quickly making up for lost ground with the development of cloud computing in the closed mobile space.

I've always found the Apple walled garden a bit scary in its restrictions. Now the walls are getting higher and thicker - and other vendors will be following suit as fast as they dare.

I don't find Google's garden as threatening, for some reason. Perhaps because they have a different business model, based on page views rather than selling devices or software. For now that encourages them to not put any limits on where and how you access their services. But will that change if the Chromebook takes off? Is the fact that Honeycomb is not open source a tiny black cloud on the horizon?

Java gets Reheated at OSCON

It's good to see that O'Reilly is adding a Java flavour to the OSCON conference. They have a good blog post highlighting why they think Java (and the JVM) is still one of the most important programming platforms around, especially for open source development.



Some of the interesting Java projects that will be covered at the conference are:

• Incanter, a Clojure-based statistics library (this project is particularly interesting to me, since it overlaps with some of the target space of JEQL)
  
• Gradle, a Groovy DSL for building, testing, and deploying software
• Jenkins, a continuous integration platform
• Neo4J, a graph database

Some may think that Java is entering the Red Giant phase of language evolution, but it still has the capacity to throw off some powerful solar flares. The longer the coffee pot sits on the stove, the stronger it gets...