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Did you notice the Interface changes coming in the Office 2007 suite? The following are some of the features and screenshots of this. I am sure you will defenitely love this new, attractive interface and graphics.

Most of them will be the new trends of Interface design. For example the concept of “Contextual Tabs”. This is called as the heart of the new user interface….

The screenshots given below are taken from official blog of Mr. Jensen Harris and if you want to read more about this topic then please visit here and here

• The Ribbon

The traditional menus and toolbars have been replaced by the Ribbon — a new device that presents commands organized into a set of tabs.The tabs on the Ribbon display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas in the applications.

Word-ribbon

Excel-ribbon

Powerpoint-ribbon

• The Microsoft Office button

a single central location where a user can see all of these capabilities like share, protect, print, publish, and send in one place. File-level features were mixed in with authoring features.

New MSOffice button (Central Point)

• Contextual Tabs

The Contextual Tabs contain all the features you need for working with the selected object.The way it works is this: The default tabs for the application contain only the commands that are not object-specific. It turns out that this drastically simplifies the functionality you have to look through because so much of Word, for example, only works when you have a Table or a Chart or a Picture or a Header or a Drawing or a Text Box selected.

Contextual Tab

• Galleries

Galleries are the other huge attraction of the redesigned applications. Galleries provide users with a set of clear results to choose from when working on their document, spreadsheet, presentation, or Access database.

Gallery

Technorati Tags : MSOffice 2007, Microsoft, Softwares

HSQLDB is a relational database engine written 100% in Java , with a JDBC driver. This supports a subset of ANSI-92 SQL. It is best known for its small size, ability to execute completely in memory and its speed. It offers a small (about 100k), fast database engine which offers both in memory and disk based tables. Embedded and server modes are available. Additionally, it includes tools such as a minimal web server, in-memory query and management tools (can be run as applets or servlets, too) and a number of demonstration examples.This is currently being used as a database and persistence engine in many Open Source Software projects and even in commercial projects and products! It is free under the Modified BSD License.

HSQLDB home : here
Features of hsqldb : here
Known problems with hsqldb: here

Technorati Tags : HSQLDB,

Have you ever used jTrac? … If you want to track the errors and issues causing with in the development or testing environment then, I am sure this will be better option for you. jTrac is a web-based application ideal for issue tracking with built-in workflow. It is a lightweight J2EE application built on the Spring Framework and Hibernate. This is designed to be generic, you can customize fields to track items (like bugs) & allocate tasks etc. It has a simple user interface and using a small database called HSQLDB. To use the jTrac we just have to do the following. Copy the war file to the servlet-engine then start it . HSQLDB will automatically starts at the time of engines startup.

Some features of the jTrac are listed below

• Add custom fields and drop downs
• Per-project customizable workflow
• Field-level permissions
• Detailed history view
• E-mail notifications
• File attachments
• Full text search
• Search and filter even on custom fields
• Dashboard view of statistics
• Export data and search results to Excel
• Support for anonymous browsing of projects
• Relate items to each other, e.g. “duplicate of”, “depends on” etc.
• Support for all popular databases
• Database upgrade and migration scripts available
• Embedded database and web-app server - download and start using right away!

If you want to refer more about its features then please visit here
You can download it from here and the newest version available is 2.0-RC3-update1.

Reference: jTrack Home

Technorati Tags: jTrack, Bug tracking, Spring Framework, HSQLDB

ICEfaces also released as opensource under the Mozilla Public License, on this Tuesday :).
ICEfaces is a profoundly powerful extension framework for JavaServer Faces which provides excellent Ajax integration with no heavy lifting. This extends JavaServer Faces, enabling Java developers to more easily create and deploy thin-client rich Web applications in Java technology. ICEfaces applications are Java technology based applications, not JavaScript applications

Technorati Tags:  ICEFaces

Reference: Mr.Joshua Marinacci’s Blog

• Real bugs will be fixed faster and non-bugs will be closed faster than ever.
• Java won’t fork. Few developers will have incentive to fork Java. It’s a lot of work for little gain. Branches for new features or new platform support: yes. A true fork: no. Not even MS has much to gain from this anymore.
• The JCP will grow and change. As before, big decisions about the future of Java will go through the Java Community Process. However, with more interested developers the ranks of the JCP will grow and change in some very good ways.
• Java will have first class support on Linux, Free-BSD, and other 100% open operating systems. This is huge. Hugely, huge. I’m hoping we’ll finally get a KDE look and feel as well.
• NetBeans will open the entire JDK sources all at once. It’s true, we’re working on it for NetBeans 6. With the new editor infrastructure this will be possible. You might not actually want to do this, but it should be possible if you’ve got enough memory.
• We will see lots of small crazy experimental versions of Java that add different things. Imagine a JDK with Find Bugs, MySQL, SwingX, JDIC, JInput, JOGL, Java3D, Tritonus MP3, jSDL, KDE-Java, Gnome-Java and a bunch of other cool libraries pre-integrated. We might even see an entire downloadable VMWare virtual harddrive with Ubuntu + Super JDK + NetBeans preinstalled for the ultimate prefab development environment.
• More adoption of Looking Glass. Now that Java can be freely run on Linux desktops out of the box, there is incentive to ship Looking Glass bundled in with the OS. There’s a lot of good 3D cards out there. Let’s use’em!
• More 3D Java Games for all platforms. I expect that people will start shipping an optimized copy of Java embedded in their applications. The end user will never need to know that Java is involved. JOGL + Java3D is now available for Win, Mac, and any copy of Linux with the right X configuration (which is more common than ever).
• Burnable Java. Imagine a tool that burns a photo slideshow application preloaded with your photos, plus a copy of Java, straight to a CD. Hand the CD to your Mom, she pops it into her computer, and the photo slideshow starts right up. You’ll never need to worry about the version of Java because it’s shipped with your app. You don’t need to worry about the OS because you code against Java, not against native APIs. (hmm. perhaps ‘burnable java’ isn’t the right name for this.
• Java will grow to fill every available computing niche and finally achieve the goal of total world domination.

Technorati Tags: Java, OpenSource