This development release of DrJava includes a great deal of new features
and some bug fixes. We have now added support for Language Levels,
projects, and Java 1.5 features in the Interactions Pane.
The language level facility supports progressively complex subsets of the
Java language. Two of the main benefits of language levels are the
avoidance of the need to teach students a great deal of syntax before they
can begin to write programs in Java and the commonplace methods such as
toString and equals that are automatically generated at the early levels.
Only the Elementary and Intermediate levels are supported at this time.
More detailed documentation on language levels can be found at
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~javaplt/doc/LanguageLevelDocumentation.html.
The project facility allows users to create .pjt files that store a list
of files that are associated with a project and the path that compiled
files should be placed in. Users can open, save, and close projects from
the new Project menu. Project files are displayed as trees in the
document list pane on the left. In the future, more functionality will be
added to projects.
Java 1.5 features such as autoboxing/unboxing, static import, foreach,
variable arguments, and enums are now supported in the Interactions Pane
if DrJava is run with a Java 1.5 compiler. Generics are allowed, but no
type-checking is done.
A major memory leak has been fixed such that projects with hundreds of
files can now be opened. There were other minor bug fixes as well.
There are many new features in this release, and we will attempt to
release more frequently in the future, however, most of these features
were worked on in parallel and completed at nearly the same time. Please
download and test this release as your primary copy of DrJava
(http://drjava.org).
Signing off,
James
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