GNU Classpath 0.92 review

GNU Classpath (essential libraries for Java) is a project to create free core class libraries for use with virtual machines and compi

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 8946K Developer: GNU Classpath Hackers

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GNU Classpath (essential libraries for Java) is a project to create free core class libraries for use with virtual machines and compilers for the Java programming language.

GNU Classpath project includes all native methods and core classes necessary for a completely functional execution environment.

What's New in This Release:
New StAX pull parser and SAX-over-StAX driver. Lots of DOM, SAX/StAX, XPath and XSLT improvements. Support for XInclude and XML Base added. Conformance is now regularly tested against various test-suites at http://builder.classpath.org/xml/ See also doc/README.jaxp.
Full beans XMLEncoder implementation.
javax.sound.sampled implementation.
javax.print.attribute and javax.print.event implementated.
Lots of new datatransfer, print swing and swing.text work and optimization.
Additional 1.5 support. Including new (separate) generic branch release.
SecurityManager cleanups and start of review of all Permission checks (includes adding lots of new checks to the Mauve test-suite).
Buildable on cygwin.
Fully buildable as "in-workspace" library-plus-vm inside (native) Eclipse see http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/ClasspathHackingWithEclipse
Full example that shows a real world CORBA and Free Swing implementation. See examples/gnu/classpath/examples/CORBA/swing/README.html

Runtime interface changes:

New method VMStackWalker.getClassLoader() was added to avoid an infinite loop between getCallingClassLoader() and Class.getClassLoader().
The included fdlibm implementation has seen several cleanups to handle new architectures and namespacing issues (in particular for ppc, darwin and non-C99 compilers). Please double check any arithmetic test against new platforms/runtimes.
The gnu.java.net.Plain[Datagram]Socket implementations have been turned into VM reference classes with JNI/Posix implementations.

New/Untested/Disabled Features:

The following new features are included, but not ready for production yet. They are explicitly disabled and not supported. But if you want to help with the development of these new features we are interested in feedback. You will have to explicitly enable them to try them out (and they will most likely contain bugs). If you are interested in any of these then please join the mailing-list and follow development in CVS.
Cairo Gtk+ Graphics2D support, enabled by giving configure --enable-gtk-cairo.
QT4 AWT peers, enable by giving configure --enable-qt-peer.

What's New in This Release:
Graphics2D based on Cairo has been made the default.
A new applet viewer plugin is provided for embedding in browsers.
New ImageIO providers for PNG, GIF, and BMP images have been added.
Support for reading and writing MIDI files and reading .au and .wav audio files have been added.
Various new tools (jar, native2ascii, serialver, keytool, jarsigner) were added.
A new GConf based util.peers backend was added.
Support for using alternative root certificate authorities was added.
javax.management and lang.managment runtime support was started.
NIO channels now support scatter-gather operations.