My Flip-flops / Blog: Recent posts

Today I released version 4.1.0. The main change is that I added some classes I had written earlier but not released yet. They are in the module core, packages
* de.mgmechanics.crypto.pki
* de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.net
* de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.report

I haven't prepared binaries to upload to Maven Central yet. This will be done later.

Today I released a new major version, 4.0.0. What's new:

• I split the code across 3 modules because one of them, javafx, depends on an external library, JavaFX. I don't want to have to exclude JavaFX from every project which doesn't need JavaFX.

• I removed some deprecated methods.

The artefacts will not be available on Maven Central because I will not use it in any of my projects but add further code and then releasing version 4.1.0 whose artefacts will be available on Maven Central as usual.

Build the project with OpenJDK 11 on Linux. After some fixes on the pom.xml: No problems.

There are two minor adds:
1. Added a method to detect if the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) provides full or only "strong" security. All security-related Java applications (e.g. web services) should have such a function and log at least a warning if the JRE provides not the full security. Please not that this function itself is not cryptografic software, it merely detects the facts.
2. Added a function to read resources from the JAR file wich works with Java 9 without having a module-info.java file.

1. I found out that reading resource file from inside of a JAR file was implemented in a confusing way and made trouble in production. So I deprecated this method and replaced it by a clean implementation. Now you can provide to path to the resource file as everyone does i.e. "/path/to/my/resource" (with the JAR file being "/").

2. This affected TextResource too, so I added a new method which uses the new way to read resources while the existing method is deprecated.... read more

myflipflops 3.1.0 is released! I added some tools around creating digests (MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256).

Version 2.0.0 and up are available on Sonatype Nexus: https://oss.sonatype.org/#nexus-search;quick~mgmechanics. To make my archives fitting on their conventions I had to renew the archives from 2.0.0 up. No content changed, just renaming some jars.

Most remarkable changes:
1. myflipflops 3.0.0 contains some classes useful to build JavaFX applications.
2. myflipflops 3.0.0 needs now Java 8 to be build with.

Uploading my packages to Maven Central failed. After polishing every bit to match their standards I made it to upload my packages without being rejected immediately. The state was shown as "staging" but no further actions seemed possible. So I checked from time to time when my packages would be available. But after a two weeks or so I got a message telling me that my packages were rejected because of a timeout.... read more

This release of myflipflops (2.0.1) is now available via Sonatype Maven Central. Now you can include this library in you pom file as any other dependency.

I included the signature files in the zip file.

The writing "myflipflops" as project name is intended. It's funnier than "MyFlipFlops".

I am trying to put this library to Sonatype Maven Central (http://central.sonatype.org) but as with JDecisiontableLib I am struggling with a missing signature file.

But good the news are, that this is the only thing what went wrong when trying to upload the binaries.

Reason for the new Release is only one Bugfix, see Changes.txt. There are no changes for the API or function (except the bugfix).

Today I am releasing version 2.0.0 of the library MyFlipflops. There are a lot of improvements but also major changes. Although some classes were removed, you should consider to use the new version and replace the removed classes as recommended in the Changes.txt.

What about version 1.1.0?
After some development I realised that I need to remove some classes before anybody else is relying on them. Therefore, I finished version 1.1.0 but do not release it.

Among other things I added an feature to translate numbers to letters like 0 => A, 1 => B, ..., 26 => AA, 27 => AB, ... as class de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.calc.NumbersToLetters. It will be available for the upcoming version 1.1.0. This feature was originally meant for JDecisiontable but I changed my mind and doesn't use this feature. But it is still available and I will care for it.

The source of all my projects are free of swearings, four-letter-words, and (mentioning of) alcohol. The MIT licence I usually provide is short, simple and really easy to understand. So there should be no reason to forbid your children to deal with it.

Sorry the version number doesn't match the international accepted version scheme. There is a change in class TextResource which breaks compatibility to myflipflops 1.0.9.

The next version will have minor changes only and this will be version 1.1.0.

Merry and peaceful Christmas to you all!

The developing process in this project goes on. As you see in Code I already made first steps towards a Version 1.0.10 while working on Bifurcum/Bifurcumlib.

There will be improvements mainly on class TextResource which will get more handy and more professional by enabling using an Enum via interface instead of strings for the keys.

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Edit 1: Ups, wrong blog!

I decided to apply the MIT licence after reading this helpful article: Closing the Loophole: Open Source Licensing & the Implied Patent License written by Christian H. Nadan.

Main reason for this release is an enhancement of class de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.File.TextResource which become necessary through JDecisiontable having some trouble reading UTF-8 encoded resource files from inside the jar file. Thus I added the ability to get all text resources from outside of the jar file.

Additionally I improved the javadoc for said class. It can be found on the project website or inside the zip file.... read more

Please note that the classes from package de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test were moved to project [Awtomat[(http://sourceforge.net/projects/awtomat/).

Main new feature is that class de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.File.TextResource was added to get text resources from JSON my way. May it is your way too?

I moved the classes from de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test. to new project Awtomat. The classpath is now de.mgmechanics.awtomat.swing..

This change is relevant for all versions from 1.0.8 of myflipflops onward (version scheme changes but numbers count on). I did not change version 1.0007.

If someone out there uses my classes: Please update you import section.

Today I released MyFlipFlops version 1.0007. Main reason for this release is that we need a reliable facility for reading text from files with different character sets as UTF-8 or windows-1252 (aka "ANSI") with different type of linefeeds.

edit: You need to go to "Files" and download it. Sourceforge shows version 1.0006 as default to download. I don't know how to fix it.

While reading text from files with different type of linefeeds worked with version 1.0006 it failed to read text with different character sets. I set up four test cases using the most common combinations (I think) for Textfile.file2Array and Textfile.file2String (each):
1. character set = UTF-8, linefeed = Linux
2. character set = UTF-8, linefeed = Windows
3. character set = ISO-8859-15, linefeed = Linux
4. character set = "ANSI", linefeed = Windows... read more

I blogged article about test automation with myflipflops soon Article.

The classes in de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test does still a great job. Recently I got 93.55% test coverage with 129 test cases for JDecisiontable. This lets me deliver new versions fast because all the tedious work is done by the machine.... read more

Today I released version 1.0006 of de.mgmechanics.myflipflops. I fixed a bug in de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test.Rest which prevented the thread from ending if interrupting causes an exception. For this reason I removed version 1.0005 (there the bug was coded in) from download.

To my excuse I read about Java's thread facilities again. Indeed, "Handbuch der Java-Programmierung", 6. Auflage 2009 (ISBN 978-3-8273-2874-8) shows in Listing 22.3 on page 504 to leave the catch block empty but "Java 7 - Mehr als eine Insel", 1. Auflage 2012 (ISBN 978-8362-1507-7) teaches in listing 2.8 on page 79/80 to call interrupt() in the catch block.... read more

de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test helps me in many ways to test the GUI of JDecisiontable (a Java Swing GUI application). Yesterday I had a code coverage of 92.25% but added some test cases today because I found some use case, even such use cases which raise message dialogs, not tested. This was done easy way by running all tests using de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test and the cobertura plugin in Netbeans. ... read more

Today I'm released Version 1.0005. Highlight and main reason for this release are the classes in the package de.mgmechanics.myflipflops.swing.test which are together my personal choice for GUI test automation for Java Swing GUIs. It is heavily used to test the the application JDecisiontable from same author.

The reason to write it was that I can neither afford a license for a "real" capture-and-replay-tool i.e. HP QuickTest Professional nor the time to write are testframework. Trying some free testautomation frameworks failed - i didn't get them running within an hour (each).... read more