SemanticMetadata.net

Lucene 1.9 Release Scheduled

According to Doug Cutting and what he said in the lucene-java-dev mailinglist, Lucene 1.9 RC1 should be out by Monday next week, Feb. the 20th. Following this RC1 release the final version is planned for release a week later, around the 27th of February.

Lucene 1.9 includes brings new features including compressed storage for fields, an Iterator for the Hits objects, an IndexModifier for read/write operations combining IndexReader and IndexWriter and much more. See for instance the changes file in the SVN for more information.

New Beta Version of JGoodies Looks

With 29th of January JGoodies released 2.0 beta version of their free library Looks. In general Looks is a Java Swing look & feel making a Swing application look better, especially using Windows. For a really good example of the use of the JGoodies Looks library download and run JabRef, the Java open source bibliography reference manager.

IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 updated

The IBM alphaWorks toolkit for MPEG-4 has been updated. With this toolkit an API for handling MPEG-4 video and AAC as well as MP3 Audio is provided. It also includes 5 sample applications for decoding and encoding MPEG-4 (and MP3 and AAC) streams.

Looking great on the first view the IBM MPEG-4 toolkit has one major drawback: For using it a license has to be purchased.This is a feature, which disqualifies the toolkit for usage in a GPL application.

Other options, besides the Java Media Framework, for integrating multimedia capabilities in Java applications are for instance:

• MediaFrame MPEG-4 Player,
• SurePlayer MPEG-1 Player,
• KuttPech MPEG Player,
• Java Media Jukebox (e.g. mp3, ogg, mpeg) and
• JavaLayer MP3 de- and encoder

A review of above libraries and toolkits will follow.

New Version of Metadata Extractor Library

After more than 2 years Drew Noakes updated his metadata-extractor library. This library is pure Java and allows the extraction of EXIF 2.2 and IPTC, some camera specific maker notes (e.g. Fuji and Canon) and JPEG segments. Currently the library processes only JPEG files. In its last version the library wrote some debug information to System.out, which has been fixed. For documentation on further changes and more information visit Drew Noakes site.