Jef / News: Recent posts

On the 2nd sept. 2004 "The JEF Project" has been embraced by the JXTA Community.

We do hope this opportunity will give us the visibility we need in order to find new enthusiastic users will to experience something which might deeply change th way they intend both software and programming nowadays.

Our work is in progress in these days, and we are now facing some really challenging tasks fundamental to the whole project.
As soon as we obtain any result we'll let you know about it.... read more

This release contains a couple of important bug fixings and comes with a new useful Ant target called "parse" which enables you to easly inspect Java class files. Unlikely at the moment the output provided by the above inspection is not quite easy to read: it is the textual output of the unmarshalling of the class file actually. This is why in the next release we are planning to provide you with a most comfortable output formatting. Anyway the main purpose of this release was to fix the bug we discovered in the validation of the ConstantValue attribute.

This release has introduced a number of new features to the JEF-Dna subproject components, and has improved the Javadoc documentation. The most remarkable improvement is the possibility to perform a lightweight validation against a programmatically generated Java class file. The validation process mimics the one carefully described by the Java Virtual Machine Official Specification ( 4.9.1) but it is not meant (at least at the moment) to perform all the required steps since it has to be a lightweight validation process that should be used to find out only coars-grained inconsistencies. For sake of clarity let's highlight the steps we carry out: ... read more

Finally we have release the first official alpha-distribution of the JEF Project (Java Evolutionary Framework). As you can see from the documentation that comes with the downloadable boundle, at the moment just the Dna subproject can be considered as pretty stable. This alpha release is a good chance for you to get in touch with the possibilities offered by the JEF Dna subproject for dinamically manipulating Java classes up to the bytecode level. ... read more

We have recently deviced an elegant solution to a problem we had by means of generics. So, from now on, we are pleased to announce that The JEF Project requires both the new JDK 1.5.0 (now in beta testing) and Ant 1.6.1.

At the moment Ant 1.6.1 is boundled with our JEF distribution.

Once the current session of test is accomplished, we shall release the new version of JEF.

Thanks to everyone interested in our efforts,
Francesco
(The JEF Team)

Since the 2nd half of march 2004, we started using Clover (http://www.thecortex.net/clover/index.html) for generating the JEFNet Proj. Code Coverage Reports.

This will help us in devising more useful test-suites, constantly having in mind which classes and packages need more attention, obtaining as an overall result a more reliable and less error-prone project.

Check-out our Code Coverage Reports @ http://jefnet.sourceforge.net/reports/clover_html/index.html... read more

We have terminated the development of the object oriented Java class file representation (Dna in the JEFNet Proj.) validation process. The next step we are now diving in is intensively testing it!

This means that by now the latest CVS snapshot can be downloaded.

As soon as the testing phase comes to its end, we shall apply a new revision tag like "jef-stable-0_2alpha" to the JEFNet sources, but for now keep on downloading the latest CVS image, which includes the latest updates related to the Dna validation process.... read more

Eventhough it might not appear, we are ALIVE and ACTIVE.

The JEFNet Proj. SF home page does not show any valid statistic about our CVS activity, but that is mainly due to a wide spread problem in aggregating such data if I am not wrong.

We do hope the problem will be fixed as soon as possible.

Francesco
(The JEFNet Team)

Those willing to check out the jef CVS module should specify as revision tag the following one:

jef-stable-0_1alpha

The latest version won't compile since we are deeply chancing the exception handling during the validation phase.
A new message will be posted once these changes are completely done.

The JEF-Team

Completed the first release of the validation environment. Now the verification phase has to begin.

At the moment the JEF team is accomplishing some logging-related tasks, and we are glad to announce that as soon as possible a first demo release will be available to end users.
Anyway, we encourage developers, end users or anyone else to beta-test our software downloading it from both the CVS repository, the nightly tarballs, or the offical releases (once available).

Thanks,
the JEF Team