DZone Daily Dose - 2009/12/1

Still trying to figure out a productive use for Google Wave? Go see what the Seattle Times did. The newspaper set up a public Wave to gather information from the community about a suspected cop-killer's wereabouts. The Wave already has over 100 people contributing. Police scanner audio, live video footage, and a suspect description are all embedded in the Wave. The amount of communication is inspiring, but also overwhelming for some. One person said "google wave is a mess." When Google Wave goes fully public, the mess might get even bigger for public waves.

The newest version of Ruby on Rails is rolling into the station. Ruby on Rails 2.3.5 has improved compatability with Ruby 1.9 and now works with the new rails_xss plugin. This plugin makes XSS protection automatic in Rails applications. The next major release for Rails is version 3.0, which doesn't have a release date yet. Ruby on Rails 3.0 will be able to merge with Ruby's Merb framework.

Both Groovy 1.6.6 and Groovy 1.7 RC1 are now available on the codehaus site. The simultaneous release of the popular JVM dynamic language includes bug fixes and improvements. The first release candidate for Groovy 1.7 includes better @Grape support in the Groovy Console, initial support for inner classes and nested classes, better support for annotations, an enhanced assert method, and a rewritten GroovyScriptEngine.

Linux Mint 8, codenamed "Helena", was just released and is now available for download. Version 8 of the LinuxMint desktop distribution is based on Ubuntu 9.10. The new version includes a new upload manager and support for OEM installs. The new upload manager can filter which packages receive updates. Linux Mint 8 comes in Universal and Main editons. The Universal edition doesn't include the proprietary software.

"Building Rich Swing Applications with Groovy - Part I" is today's top link on DZone. The blog post shows Swing developers how to make their lives easier with Groovy.