ANNOUNCE: japitools 0.9.5 released

[Stuart Ballard]

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/