After one year of no updates, the first cut of the next major version of Java's top UPnP/DLNA library, Cling, is now available. You can download the ZIP or use 2.0-alpha1 in your Maven build.

What's new:

• Dual-licensed under LGPL or CDDL, this should resolve any legal issues with packaging Cling in Android DEX/APK format.
• Support for CDI, the Workbench app is now a full Swing/CDI application with a nice MVP pattern. We still have to write a simple Cling/CDI demo app and integrate GENA and CDI eventing.
• New demo applications for Cling on Android, with source, available in the distribution and fully documented in the manual. Android platform level 15 is now required.
• Much improved stability and interoperability; code from several production applications was contributed (thanks Michael Pujos!) and we now have lenient XML parsers and processors available.
• New network transport based on Jetty 8 client and server, as any other popular HTTP client is unusable on Android.
• (The bridge and osgi modules are not ready at this time and aren't included in the alpha1 release.)

Please give this new version a thrashing and report issues on the mailinglist.

XHTML has been one of my favorite text file formats for the last five years. This website uses it internally, try the same HTTP request with an .xhtml extension. I'm currently writing a book in my IDE in XHTML. All my Java unit tests have XHTML Javadoc, and I create my software manuals from and with XHTML. Even presentation slides I write in XHTML, with a simple 20 line Javascript player.

Recently, as I was working on the new edition of Java Persistence with Hibernate, one of my favorite issues made it again to the top of the list: How components in Java EE can share (or not share) a JPA persistence context. Other names given to the same problem are persistence context propagation, inheritance, etc. The persistence context is the centerpiece of JPA, it's how a JPA service guarantees a scope of object identity: when loadedEntityInstance == loadedEntityInstance is true or not. You'd imagine that the rules should be as simple as possible, as even Java object identity and equality is frequently a hurdle for many beginners.

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