XML News from Wednesday, October 25, 2006

The Mozilla Project has released Firefox 2.0, a open source web browser for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that supports XML, XHTML, XSLT, and SVG. New features in 2.0 include:

• Anti-Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Scrollable tabs
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in forms (ironically the first word it flagged for me as misspelled was "Firefox")
• Search plugin manager
• Microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer
• JavaScript 1.7
• Client-side session and persistent storage (a really hideous idea, sure to be misused)
• svg:textPath

I've been using Firefox 2 as my primary browser since beta 1, and it's been pretty smooth over all. The inline spell checking is indispensable, and worth the upgrade alone. The restore session option is also quite nice. As of the last release candidate all my important extensions now seem to work in this version.

Werner Guttmann has released Castor 1.0.4, an open source (BSD license) data binding tool for XML and Java. Castor can marshal and unmarshal XML documents into Java objects, and store those objects in SQL databases. Automatic generation of Java classes from W3C XML schema language schema is supported, though that doesn't seem to be required. This is a bug fix release.