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Lire 0.8 released

I just released LIRe v0.8. LIRe – Lucene Image Retrieval – is a Java library for easy content based image retrieval. Based on Lucene it doesn’t need a database and works reliable and rather fast. Major change in this version is the support of Lucene 3.0.1, which has a changed API and better performance on some OS. A critical bug was fixed in the Tamura feature implementation. It now definitely performs better Hidden in the depths of the code there is an implementation of the approximate fast indexing approach of G. Amato. It copes with the problem of linear search and provides a method for fast approximate retrieval for huge repositories (millions?). Unfortunately I haven’t tested with millions, just with tens thousands, which proves that it works, but it doesn’t show how fast.

Links

• Download Lire & Lire Demo

NetBeans Community Approves NetBeans 6.7 for Prime Time Release

The NetBeans community acceptance survey has voted for thhe last NetBeans 6.7 RC to be stable enough to be shipped. While this sounds great there is one minor details I consider critical for the significance of the survey: Only 182 people responded. (re-engineneered from 144 people being 79%). If we go with common numbers in empirical research ~5 % of the population take part in survey like these and therefore I conclude that the size of the NetBeans community is around 3.600 people.

NetBeans is actually having quite a a hard time with Eclipse pressing from open source and Idea pressing from commercial alternatives. Also the free IDEs of Microsoft’s .NET family affect the scene. However, I still think that if NetBeans manages to advance from the “I can do all” principle to a small and lean application development environment featuring a fast and intelligent editor and a WYSIWYG gui builder there is definitely a chance.

Links

• Announcement.

Visual VM is Part of Java 1.6 Update 7

Java 1.6 u7 was released recently by Sun. While not bringing major changes it brought along some bug fixes and solved some security issues. However there is one main addition: The VisualVM. This is a really great developer tool: It connects to running VMs and shows “some statistics” about them. Besides memory usage and threads information it also allows to do some basic profiling. In my opinion Sun did a good job on including VisualVM in the package! Not that this thing is build on the NetBeans Platform

Links:

• Java 1.6 u7 release notes

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and – of course – who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

• http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Lire SVN build for Java 1.5

Due to requests I took some time and built a Java 1.5 version instead of the 1.6 versions. A simple compile with 1.5 wouldn’t help as I use the swing layout classes of NetBeans (now integrated in Java 1.6), so imports have to be re-adjusted and the library has to be added. Furthermore I created an explicit build target in Caliph to create a 1.5 version of the cbir jar file. This snapshot works fine with MacOS (as far as I’ve heard) and on Windows.

Files:

• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.tar.bz2 [670k]
  
• liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk1.5.zip [884k]
  

Lire development: a big next step ..

While it has been quiet for some time around Lire, recently development has been pushed forward. I switched to SVN for development and integrated simple RGB color histograms as a feature for comparison with the MPEG-7 features. Savvas Chatzichristofis (or on facebook, his image search engine) contributed the CEDD feature, which works great! Marko Keuschnig and Christian Penz contributed implementations for the Gabor texture feature and the Tamura texture features, where the latter is already in the SVN. I also integrated the new features in LireDemo. A new version – already compiled – can be downloaded here: liredemo-svn-2008-05-29-jdk16.tar.bz2 Note that Java 1.6 is required.

NetBeans 6.1 Released

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 has been released 2 days ago. Changes are more incremental than fundamental, but it features now support for JavaScript and code completion for JavaDoc. Furthermore support for MySQL has been added. Release notes can be found here.

Computer Games: Parallax Scrolling & Sprites

Currently I’m preparing for giving my talk next Friday in the computer games lesson on multimedia issues in games. To underline my words and slides with some code I also coded some easy little Java program visualizing sprite animation and some star field background. The coding was great fun – the third scrolling shooter I coded … always a pleasure

However there is one thing I found out while coding: Ready to use sprite animation image stripes are hard to get. There is a little tool called simple explosion maker” that came handy and the SpriteLib of Flying Yogi is rather cool, but I miss the great deal of online creative commons content. Perhaps one could point me there

Related links:

• Simple explosion maker – A simple tool for rendering explosions.
• SpriteLib – GPL-ed sprites of Flying Yogi

Java SE 6 Update 10 Beta – A Desktop Release?

Java has been around a long time now and had a lot of success – at server side at most. Issues that still wait for being solved are discussed with each release, one of them is desktop integration. Swing is nice – at least since NetBeans integrated the Matisse GUI editor – but has looked awful for a long time. With Java SE 6 update 10 Nimbus found its way into the Java SE: Nimbus is a vector based look and feel and can therefore support many resolutions in arbitrary steps. Furthermore it is claimed that it is D3D accelerated and therefore a lot faster than standard L&Fs. That was interesting enough for me to take a look at the beta release

In the middle of below image you find the Nimbus theme, surrounded by JGoodies Plastic (on the left) and the standard XP one on the right (a click on the image reveals the full resolution version). What I found out is:

• Nimbus takes a lot more space, there is more empty space in between combobox items, etc.
• I didn’t manage to remove all borders from buttons, as can be seen in the top button row with white background.
• Focus and progress is painted nicely, it looks appealing.
• the menu items in nimbus look strange in combination with the icons, the gap between icon and text is too small.

This years JavaOne is coming …

Last year’s JavaOne had 15,000 attendees so there’s a number to reach and exceed 2008 JavaOne takes place May 6-9 in San Francisco and covers virtually every aspect of Java. Especially interesting is in my opinion th Open Source tracks as Java is really strong there (compared to the open source portfolio offered in .NET/C# and the portability of libraries in other languages). I wish I could go there but I’m chairing another interesting event here in Klagenfurt at the same time.

Related links:

• 2008 JavaOne Conference Homepage