Jarsync - a Java rsync implementation. / News: Recent posts

By popular demand, I've relicensed the code (the core pieces, and only the ones I can relicense) under the disjunction of the GPL+linking exception and the Apache License. You can choose either one you want.

I've also moved the code to Subversion, and have modified the org.metastatic.rsync library to use Java 5 features. The code in SVN trunk also fixes some nasty bugs in the code, especially the rdiff workalike program.... read more

I have made the 0.3 release of Jarsync.

This release contains much of the core functionality of the rsync program, and is able to send and receive files as a client. Much is left to be done, but the difficult tasks of network compatibility have been solved.

You are encouraged to try it! It may not be production-ready, but it is functional, and I would appreciate knowing how well it works for you -- especially what you think is missing.... read more

I have just put the first version of vwdiff, a tool that perodically creates visual differences of web pages throuh time, on the Jarsync page.

I think this is a nifty little tool, since I have a list of web sites that I regularly visit and like having something that can tell me which pages have been recently changed, and by how much. Vwdiff does this by periodically polling a list of web pages and uses Jarsync to quickly compute the differences between the new version and the version you most recently visited, and draws simple, color-coded representations of these differences.... read more

This is to announce release 0.2 of Jarsync.

This version brings a number of improvements, including a partial test suite, a (possibly) fully correct algorithm, and a new "streaming" version of the API.

The dream of an rsync-compatible program lives on; right now -- after a few long nights -- I have a partial implementation of a rsync server, the daemon that runs on port 873. It is half done, in that it knows how to send files but can't receive them yet. Rsync-2.5.5 happily talks with it as though it were the real thing, and it reconstructs files properly. There is much work left on this, but now that it seems possible (e.g. the core API looks compatible) I'll keep working on this.... read more

Jarsync now has a handful of regression tests, implemented using the Mauve test framework. The tests I have so far, which exercise MD4 and a simple example of the algorithm running "for real", all pass.

I have been tweaking the API recently, and while it is OK right now, I would like it to be less of a "stop-the-world" affair -- right now to de anything you have to pass big byte arrays or files to the methods, wait, and then get the entire output at once. As it is this makes using the library VERY simple, but it is possibly not well suited for streaming data, which we would expect to encounter most of the time.... read more

By request, Jarsync will no longer be available under the plain GPL, but rather the "GPL+library exception" license, which is equivalent to the GPL but allows any type of linking with independent modules to create an executable. This means (at least for me) that anyone may use and link this library with proprietary code to create an executable.

There may be some actual movement on this project (I know I haven't been giving it attention recently).

The lists jarsync-{announce,devel,users} have been created. Discussion and announcements will happen there.

http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/jarsync-announce
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/jarsync-devel
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/jarsync-users

Jarsync looks far enough along (and was pretty far already when moved to SF) to go to beta pretty soon. 0.1.0 may come in the next few weeks.

I've moved this project to SourceForge, for the purposes of (1) making it more public, and (2) forcing myself to get moving on development.

Watch this space.