Today we released a new beta version of DrJava (drjava-beta-20060729-1410). The last beta before that was from June 10 (drjava-beta-20060610-0349), and the current stable release dates back to January 27 (drjava-stable-20060127-2145). Unless we find some bugs that absolutely need to be fixed, we are planning on releasing a new stable version before the start of the next semester on August 28. Until then, we’ve decided to concentrate on fixing bugs and not add new features.
Today’s beta contains a browser-like history that remembers the locations of document switches, jumping to errors, bookmarks, and so on and allows the user to move back and forth between them. I believe this is the only major feature that we have added. The beta also benefits from Corky’s work on removing concurrency problems, especially on dual core machines. I also fixed a lot of bugs, even though most were pretty minor:
- [1525433] Quick Switch (Ctrl `) Inserts ` on MacOS
- [1505569] “Clean Build Directory” breaks “Compile”
- [1504827] “getenv no longer supported, use prop”
- [1501227] Reloading file upsets Find all panel
- Fixed a problem with the browser history throwing
FileMovedExceptionsif a file didn’t exist anymore that prevented the user from switching documents. - Removed an inconsistency in the project file format, where the main class was stored relative to the source root but loaded relative to the project file.
I think I also got [1501897] Running program in debug mode resets interactions, which was a very serious problem that pretty much prevented the use of the debugger on my MacBook. The MacOS problems I reported (which I believe had the same problem as the original bug report) are definitely gone, but since I’ve never been able to reproduce the problem, I haven’t closed the bug report yet. Barnaby said he used to be able to reproduce it, but I haven’t heard from him since Monday.
We also investigated [1511641] working directory not quite right yet (though we decided to remove the “working directory” preference because it was misleading), [1505560] Inconsistent use of project root in classpath and [1505515] Javadoc with long classpaths, but we don’t think the requested changes would improve the program.
Along the way, we also did other improvements, of course. This time, only changes by Corky and me made it into the release, but Dan and Barnaby have been working behind the scenes on improving DynamicJava and the reduced model.
As always, there are still some rough edges with DrJava, but I’m pretty happy about this release. I think it’s quite stable.
