[ JDiff-users ] JDiff status update

[mike d. <md...@st...>]

hi everyone-

some of you may remember JDiff, the GPL'd visual file comparison utility
that i was given charge of late last year.

well, i don't know how many of you tried the first GPL'd release of JDiff
(2.99), but i would imagine that most of you probably shared my opinion
that it sucked pretty badly. if any of you looked at the code, you quite
possibly saw some of the reason why.

i have spent the last couple months trying to do something useful with the
CSFactory code, but just recently, i gave up on it as unsalvagable and
decided to cleanly reimplement the diff algorithm in Java myself.

i re-read the papers describing the algorithm (multiple times), and was
gearing up for a lot of work coding and debugging, when by some miracle, i
was able to find a GPL'd translation of GNU diff 1.15 to Java by a guy
named Stuart Gathman. it was fast, clean, acceptably efficient, and, most
importantly, maintainable.

i had already independently developed the custom side-by-side Swing text
widget to the point where it was nearly usable, so all i needed was a
model. with Stuart's code i was able to hack up a decent preliminary model
in a matter of hours. after that, it was not much work to link up the view
and the model. a screenshot at http://jdiff.sourceforge.net/ shows the
fruits of my preliminary efforts with a diff of jEdit.java from 2.2pre9
and 2.3pre7.

i'd like anyone who is interested in JDiff updates to subscribe to one of
the two JDiff mailing lists, jdiff-users or jdiff-devel. for the time
being, i think the devel group is probably going to be the only active
list, since there aren't really any "users" yet. information on the JDiff
mailing lists is available at http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=1877.

my tentative plans for JDiff is to import the first code into the
SourceForge CVS today or tomorrow and to release a pre1 version some time
next week (or possibly the following week). once i have a decent
foundation, i'll work on packaging JDiff into a jEdit plugin (i'd be happy
to let someone else handle that).

here's to the future of visual file comparison for everyone.

-md