Java-ISO8583 / News: Recent posts

j8583 version 1.11.0 has just been released, containing some bug fixes and new features.

The main features are:

• Now compiled for Java 7
• New types LLLLVAR and LLLLBIN

Bugs fixed in this release:

• Parsing LLLVAR fields of length 0 can throw if it's last field
• Extending parse guide which in turn extends another parse guide
• LllvarParseInfo is now thread-safe

Starting with 1.11, j8583 requires Java 7.

j8583 version 1.9.1 is now available.

This release includes several new features, mainly for XML configuration convenience:

• header elements can be defined as a reference to another header element.
• template and parse elements can extend other template and parse elements, inheriting all their field definitions. The extending types can define fields with type exclude to exclude fields defined in the extended type.
• New codec CompositeField, which also acts as a container of several IsoValues, very useful for fields than can contain subfields.
• FieldParseInfo instances can have their own CustomField which has priority over the CustomField defined (if any) for a particular field in the MessageFactory.
• Parsing guides in XML config can have fields containing subfields; they are processed as CustomFields associated to the FieldParseInfo for the outer field.... read more

j8583 1.8.0 RELEASE NOTES

This release includes some new features for support of "exotic" encodings.

• MessageFactory and IsoMessage have some new properties to force the use of proper string encoding routines
• New debugString method in IsoMessage, very useful for logging in the case of binary messages.
• Minor bug fixes related to parsing and encoding binary messages.
• Parsing exceptions have more detailed messages in certain cases.
• Improved definitions of type parameters in general.... read more

j8583 1.7.0 RELEASE NOTES

This release includes some new features and some minor changes in existing API related to the use of generics.

• Parsing exceptions have more detailed messages in certain cases.
• There is a new method in IsoMessage called updateValue which only takes the field number and the new value; it works only with fields that already have a value set, and will preserve the field type and length, replacing only the value - this can be useful to replace values in fields set from templates.
• There is a new interface CustomBinaryField which is an extension of CustomField intended for use with binary fields. Currently there are two implementations: BigIntBcdCodec and LongBcdCodec, which can be used in LLBIN/LLLBIN fields to encode longs or BigIntegers using BCD.
• All fields in MessageFactory and IsoMessage are either protected or accessible via getters/setters, which allow for subclassing.
• Improved definitions of type parameters in general.... read more

This release includes a few improvements and bugfixes.

Sometimes parsing invalid fields could throw runtime exceptions such as IOOBE; most of these are now caught or prevented and instead a ParseException is thrown, which now includes the field number.

Parsing of text messages with binary bitmaps was basically broken in 1.5.7 and has now been fixed.

To include the field number in the error messages when parsing, a new parameter was added to FieldParseInfo. This, along with the type parameter to MessageFactory (which is now used in ConfigParser), prompted me to set the new version to 1.6.0.... read more

Version 1.5.2 of the j8583 library is now available in the downloads section, as well as through Maven Repository (Sonatype and Maven Central).

This is a bugfix release, for parsing DATE10 and DATE4 types, to add a slight tolerance for future dates to accommodate slight time differences between hosts.

j8583 1.5.1 is available (has been for some time), but now also from Maven Central, as net.sf.j8583:j8583:1.5.1

Version 1.5.0 of the j8583 has just been released. It now supports different character encodings from the JVM default.

Version 1.4.0 of the j8583 library is now available. It includes some performance improvements for field encoding and message parsing, as well as three new datatypes: BINARY, LLBIN and LLLBIN, which are similar to ALPHA, LLVAR and LLLVAR but hold byte arrays instead of Strings.

Version 1.3.3 of the j8583 has just been released. It includes a couple of new features as well as bug fixes and performance improvements since 1.3.1, mainly:

• New method IsoMessage.copyFieldsFrom(otherMessage,idx...) to copy fields from one message to another in just one line.
• MessageFactory by default throws an exception if a message cannot be completely parsed because the buffer ends before all fields have been parsed, but now this can be turned off in the ignoreLastMissingField property.
• Some methods have been added to IsoType and IsoMessage for Groovy compatibility.
• Field 128 is now included in messages created by the MessageFactory.
• MessageFactory was always assigning date to the messages regardless of the assignDate property.
• MessageFactory now can create a response for a message even if it doesn't have a template for the message type; it simply copies the values from the original message and changes its type to a response.
• IsoType uses String.format() instead of concatenation with "+".

I just released version 1.3.1 of the j8583 library. It's basically the same as 1.3, except that now it uses SLF4J (http://slf4j.org/) instead of Jakarta commons-logging.

The reason for this change is that SLF4J is faster than JCL; parsing 15000 messages, 1800 of which have a missing field (to cause MessageFactory to log the error) takes 3.5 seconds with JCL and 2.5 seconds with SLF4J. In a high transaction volume environment this can have a significant impact in the overall performance of an appliation.... read more

I have release version 1.2 of the j8583 framework. The new stuff is mainly java.nio (there's a new example Server class that uses channels for network connections and the IsoMessage class can now create a ByteBuffer with its encoded message).
Also, there is a Java 1.4 compatible version of the library; it is highly recommended that you get the source directly from the SVN repository and build with the included ant file.

Version 1.1 of the j8583 framework for ISO-8583 messaging is now available. This version handles binary messages and fixes a couple of minor bugs.

The File Release system of SourceForge seems to be broken at the moment, so you can download directly from the page at this URL:

http://j8583.sourceforge.net/j8583-1.1.zip

I will set a proper release when the File Release system works again.

I have released version 1.0 with API documentation and some examples to illustrate the use of the framework. It's very simple and I hope you find it useful.