New versions of JPF are now available for download.
JPF is the open source, LGPL licensed library that is intended to provide standard plug-in infrastructure to existing or new Java projects. It helps greatly improve modularity and extensibility of Java systems and decrease their support and maintenance cost.
The Framework implements the runtime engine that dynamically discovers and runs plug-ins. A plug-in is a structured component that describes itself to the Framework using a manifest file. The Framework maintains a registry of available plug-ins and the function they provide (via extension points and extensions). To simplify deployment and distribution, plug-in may be packaged as "single ZIP file" that will be un-packed transparently in runtime when needed.
JPF package includes core runtime library, application boot utility and set of Ant tasks to automate common development routines (plug-ins versioning, packaging, documenting, integrity checks etc.)
The major changes since previous release are:
* JPF is now ported to Java 5. Two separate flavors of library are now available.
* Directory based Ant tasks in JPF-Tools library are now support nested <fileset> tags like many other standard Ant tasks.
* Fixed problems with file names and URL's that contain non-ASCII characters.
* Improved handling of "reverse lookup" plug-in dependencies.
* Added jpf-path Ant task to JPF-Tools. It helps to automatically compose plug-in classpath for using in various tasks like java, javac...
* Fixed potential deadlock situation in StandardPluginClassLoader.
Visit project home page at http://jpf.sourceforge.net for further details, documentation and tutorial.