The News Written by Aram Agajanian

OS/2 In early September, IBM made available a U.S. English release of FixPack 8. In August, releases of FixPack 7 were made for French, German, and Spanish. Additionally, releases of FixPack 6 were made for Simplified and Traditional Chinese. IBM has begun a beta program for the new release of Warp Server codenamed Aurora. A preview edition will also be made available on a limited basis to customers who are not selected for the official program. IBM is planning to ship the early release in October. Warpstock This year's Warpstock conference is approaching. It will be held from October 16 to 18 at the Wyndham Hotel in Chicago. The Warpstock organizers have put together special offers to attract shareware and freeware software developers to the event. C++ In August, IBM annouced a beta program for Visual Age C++ 4.0 for Windows NT. At the same time, it was annouced that a beta-level release for OS/2 was not yet available but forthcoming. Java On August 14, Sun Microsystems annouced that the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.2 will ship in early November for Windows NT and Sun Solaris platforms. The release of the HotSpot compiler, which is billed as bringing Java bytecode execution up to C++ speeds, is planned for February 1999. OS/2's 1.1.6-level JDK and runtime was updated twice in August. The latest release is dated o116-19980818. The update is freely downloadable. IBM's High Performance Compiler for Java, which compiles Java code to platform-specific binaries, was updated to version a12b on August 18. The compiler is freely downloadable. Netbeans has released a second beta of it's flagship Developer product, an IDE for Java based upon JavaSoft's Java Foundation Classes. The product can be downloaded at no cost after online registration with Netbeans. In August, IBM annouced that its Visual Age for Java Professional customers would receive a free upgrade to version 2.0 of the product. Arcane Technologies, Ltd. has announced that their Magician product is now available for OS/2. Magician allows Java programmers access to OpenGL services on a variety of platforms. Royalty-free commercial and non-commercial licenses are available. Rexx NetRexx was updated to version 1.142 in late August at IBM's Hursley Park Laboratories. The main purpose of this release is support for Java 1.2, but it also includes a handful of other fixes and updates for things such as Euro currency support. Ed Tomlinson released version 0.43 of njPipes on August 31. njPipes is a port of CMS/TSO Pipelines for NetRexx. This version improves the performance of and fixes bugs in previous releases. Documentation has also been updated. njPipes is freely downloadable. Source code control A port of the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.10 has been posted on hobbes by Andreas Huber. This port includes the client, the server, documentation in INF format, and many scripts. EMX libraries are required. Data Base OGC Solutions has released xDBView v099a. The product is a freeware viewer and editor of DBase (DBF) format files with a text mode interface. This is a bugfix release which also adds support of 132-column text mode for an improved viewing interface. Web A second beta of Netscape Communicator 4.04 was posted by IBM on August 21 for download via the web. This version is said to fix compatibility problems with Java 1.1.6 and other bugs. An updated version of the OS/2 Plug-in Pack v. 2.1 was also made available at the same site. Fortify has released versions of its security software for the latest beta release of Communicator 4.04 for OS/2. Fortify upgrades Communicator/2's security to 128-bit strength and can be downloaded freely. Templeton is a shareware web-mirroring tool. It is highly configurable to accurately control the information that is mirrored. Templeton is available for Linux and SunOS as well as OS/2 and can be downloaded from BMT Micro. Maccasoft has released version 1.30 of WebMirror, another shareware web-mirroring tool. WebMirror has a PM interface. This release contains fixes to the previous version. It can be downloaded from the company's web site. News Harvest v1.0 was released in early August. The software allows binary files from any number of newsgroups on any number of servers to be decoded with little or no user intervention. The software has a WPS-enabled user interface and is available under a shareware license at BMT Micro's web site. The Warpzilla team is seeking experienced PM programmers for help with the porting of Netscape Communicator 5 to OS/2. More information about this effort is available at the Mozilla web site that Netscape has set up to help programmers port the new browser to new platforms. Text processing Byte of Software Systems, Inc. has released version 2 of the Multiple Recursive Search & Replace product. This command-line utility will recurse through directories and perform multiple search-and-replace operations in a single command. Version 2 includes an improved command syntax. Fast Editor Lite v0.2.0n was released by Sergey I. Yevtushenko on August 4. Security Final releases of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) 5.0 for OS/2 have been made by William H. Geiger III. USA and International versions are freely downloadable at Geiger's home page. News items to news@edm2.com