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Sun, 26 Mar 2006
java-gnome 2.14.0 released
After months of sterling effort, the java-gnome team has released the 2.14.0 set of tarballs, consisting of:
glib-java 0.2.4
cairo-java 1.0.3
libgtk-java 2.8.4
libglade-java 2.12.3
libgnome-java 2.12.2
libgconf-java 2.12.2
The release is the culmination of an incredible amount of work from the diverse community of people who contribute to the java-gnome project. The effort for the past six months and more has been focused on stability, but this has come from a very practical direction: increasing numbers of people using java-gnome libraries, especially the flagship GTK bindings in libgtk-java, have uncovered bugs, spruced up documentation, improved memory management, and increased the number of platforms we build on.
In particular, huge kudos goes to the frysk team, largely centred out of Red Hat’s Toronto office, for having made a huge contribution: java-gnome now builds and runs crash free on 64 bit systems! The effort to do so was not merely the fringe effort of another marginal architecture, but involved dramatically improving the code throughout the JNI layer of the various libraries (where the Java code can talk to C code and thus interface with the underlying Glib, GTK, and GNOME libraries). While running on 64 bit machines is the obvious outcome, this work has benefited every user of java-gnome in terms of increased performance, reduced memory footprint and dramatically improved stability. This effort was led by Andrew Cagney.
This work did involve an ABI compatibility break, so the bump from 2.12.x to 2.14.x of the “version” of the overall family signifies this ABI change. People using the libraries built with GCJ to create native executables will have to relink their applications. For this reason and others, we are contemplating an epoch shift in our major version number so that we use version number changes appropriately as ABI and API changes happen in our libraries rather than whatever may or may not be happening on the libraries below. For the moment, however, we have kept the our individual library versions tracking the minimum required version of the underlying library they bind.
The last several months have seen bug reports and code contributions from a number of developers new to the project. This release could not have happened without the hard work of these people in tracking down issues and taking the time to report - and in many cases, fix - the problem. Of course, acknowledgements have to be made to the current java-gnome hackers: Ismael Juma, Andrew Cagney, Adam Jocksch, Sami Wagiaal, Igor Foox, Joao Victor, and Remy Suen. Developers out in the real world have been reporting bugs and making code contributions as well: Sandor Bodo-Merle, Lars Weber, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Damian Minkov, Nicholas Lativy and Sean Coughlan. And out of nowhere, Dan Williams, a very experienced hacker indeed, has been single handedly rescuing our Cairo bindings. Fantastic. It’s awesome to have all of you using this code and contributing to its improvement - truly this is software libré in action.
There are two people who need to be singled out. Firstly I would highlight the work of Remy Suen, who has tirelessly been going through bugzilla, reproducing what are often old or neglected bugs and in many cases implementing fixes! This is the sort of work that is usually thankless but it makes all the difference to the people affected by issues, and ultimately, to everyone using the code. Thanks Remy!
The other person is Ismael Juma. Alone of the previous generation of developers, Ismael has stuck with the project. He has a phenomenal knowledge of the architecture of java-gnome, especially on the memory management side, and has patiently guided numerous developers, old and new, to understand how they can best approach coding a solution to a problem. Ismael’s willingness to review code and offer insightful critique is the backbone of the project. Ismael, we don’t always agree, but you’re a pleasure to work with. Awesome job, mate.
You can download the java-gnome tarballs making up this release here. Anyone interested in learning more about writing GTK and GNOME applications using Java can either go to our website, java-gnome.sourceforge.net , or join us in #java-gnome on GIMPnet.
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