ANNOUNCE: japitools 0.9 released

[Stuart Ballard <sballard at netreach dot com>]

JAPITOOLS 0.9 RELEASED                                        2002/11/05
----------------------

I'm proud to announce the first japitools release intended for wide 
public consumption. japitools is a set of tools for testing 
compatibility between different versions of a Java API. It can be used 
both for verifying whether an independent implementation of an API is 
correct and complete, and for ensuring that binary compatibility is 
maintained between successive versions of the same API. In particular, 
japitools can be used to test the conformance of independent 
implementations of the Java platform itself.

Features of this release:

* japize tool reads Java class files and dumps a machine-readable
  representation of the API to a "japi" file.

* japicompat tool compares two japi files for binary backwards
  compatibility.

* japilist tool provides human-readable summaries of the contents of a
  japi file.

* serialize and serialcompat tools test serialization compatibility.

* japifix tool updates japi files made by previous releases, and in some
  cases can correct malformed files.

* Comparisions cover every requirement for binary compatibility as
  defined in the JLS, and more, but exclude many differences that are
  known to be insignificant, to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.

* All algorithms are tuned for memory usage and performance, to allow
  running on machines with limited resources or as unsupervised (eg
  nightly) jobs.

* japi file format is fully specified, allowing interoperable tools to
  be created.

For more information on japitools, including a change history, visit the 
project website at http://rainbow.netreach.net/~sballard/japi . 
japitools 0.9 can be downloaded from 
http://rainbow.netreach.net/~sballard/japi/japitools-0.9.tar.gz . Any 
questions or comments should be directed to sballard@netreach.net.

Particular thanks for their help in making this release as good as it 
can be go to Brian Jones for providing the ant build system, the 
serialize and serialcompat tools, and lots of wrapper scripts, along 
with some invaluable testing and setting up nightly japicompat tests for 
GNU Classpath CVS; and to Dalibor Topic for working towards a similar 
arrangement for Kaffe, and being a patient and committed tester despite 
several brown-paper-bag development releases. Thanks also to everyone 
else who's provided feedback.

Major features planned for the near future include HTML and possibly XML 
 output,and more advanced filtering of errors to allow, for example, 
ignoring errors against an early JDK version if the same problem appears 
in (more recent versions of) the JDK itself.

--
Stuart Ballard, Programmer
NetReach - Internet Solutions
(215) 283-2300, ext. 126
http://www.netreach.com/