[kaffe] ANNOUNCE: japitools 0.9.5 released
Stuart Ballard
sballard at netreach.com
Thu Nov 11 11:17:37 PST 2004
I'm pleased to announce the release of japitools 0.9.5. japitools, as
many of you know, is a toolkit for testing implementations of Java APIs
for binary compatibility.
Homepage: http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/
Download: http://www.kaffe.org/~stuart/japi/japitools-0.9.5.tar.gz
Producers of japi files are urged to produce new files with the latest
version, as several minor bugs have been identified in version 0.9.4
which will lead to erroneous information being reported by the nightly
comparison pages.
Special thanks to Jeroen Frijters for producing an entire rewrite of the
classfile reading code in a matter of days, exposing a bunch of
longstanding errors in the process, and generally knowing altogether too
much about the behavior of VMs and compilers ;) Also thanks to Michael
Koch for spotting the possibility of using japio files to decide which
errors should be ignored, making possible the most visible new feature
of this release.
New features since 0.9.4:
* A much-requested feature: the ability to ignore differences when
reporting compatibility with an early API release, if those differences
are required for compatibility with a later release. See the description
of the -i flag below for more information. This new code has been
running nightly for a while producing the results linked from the
homepage, without any known problems. It reveals that the free
implementations are much closer to full coverage of 1.0 and 1.1 than was
previously apparent - in fact already perfect for 1.0 and in Classpath's
case only one method away from 1.1.
Thanks to Michael Koch for the key insight that enabled this
feature to finally be written, four years after I first said it was needed.
* A new bytecode reading implementation from Jeroen Frijters to
replace Jode. This vastly reduces the amount of code because it only
reads and understands the bits of metadata we actually need, where Jode
was part of a larger system that needed more information. This code also
fixes a "Miranda Methods" bug in the Jode implementation.
* Also from Jeroen: methods in final classes are now treated as
final even if they weren't explicitly marked as such.
* Correct access modifiers on inner classes. Jeroen caught this one
and the fix was a joint effort.
* japicompat will warn if using a japi file from an older release
that contains known bugs. That covers all versions except for this one,
in fact. Use the -w flag to disable this warning.
* Better support for launching japiotext and japiohtml on Windows
systems (some issues may remain, however).
* The serialize and serialcompat tools have been removed (they are
now a module in the Mauve project).
--
Stuart Ballard, Senior Web Developer
NetReach, Inc.
(215) 283-2300, ext. 126
http://www.netreach.com/
More information about the kaffe
mailing list