The commons-codec team is pleased to announce the Codec 1.4 release! 

http://commons.apache.org/codec/

The codec package contains simple encoder and decoders for various formats 
such as Base64 and Hexadecimal. In addition to these widely used encoders and 
decoders, the codec package also maintains a collection of phonetic encoding 
utilities. 

Changes in this version include:

  New Features:

o [CODEC-60] Implement Caverphone.
o [CODEC-52] Digest on InputStreams.
o [CODEC-39] DigestUtils: Add methods for SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.
o [CODEC-69] Streaming Base64 (Base64InputStream and Base64OutputStream added).

  Fixed bugs:

o [CODEC-77] Base64 bug with empty input (new byte[0]).
o [CODEC-72] Soundex and RefinedSoundex issues with character arrays.
o [CODEC-71] Base64.isArrayByteBase64() method is inefficient for large byte arrays.
o [CODEC-70] Thread safety and malicious code safety improvements.
o [CODEC-68] isBase64 throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException on some non-BASE64 bytes.
o [CODEC-65] Fix case-insensitive string handling.
o [CODEC-61] Base64.encodeBase64() throws NegativeArraySizeException on large files.
o [CODEC-58] Character set used by Base64 not documented.
o [CODEC-56] RefinedSoundex creates instance before al fields have been initialized.
o [CODEC-51] Test failures in SoundexTest
o [CODEC-10] Using US_ENGLISH in Soundex caused an NullPointerException.
o [CODEC-6]  Source tarball spews files all over the place.
o [CODEC-22] Base64.isArrayByteBase64() throws an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException for negative octets

  Changes:

o [CODEC-75] Make Base64 URL-safe
o [CODEC-74] Allow for uppercase letters output in Hex.encodeHex().
o [CODEC-40] Add crypto-compatible BigInteger encoding support to Base64.

Have fun!
-The commons-codec team