With the help of Petter Reinholdtsen (yes, one of the original Japhar hackers), we finally got WW2D working with GNU Classpath and Cacao. This is pretty exciting since it is a nice showcase for our jawt and jogl support. One nice thing is that for zooming in and out you can now use the scroll wheel. As soon as I had implemented that Audrius and Roman thought up nice ways to add this also to our Free Swing components. WW2D isn’t fully functional yet since keyboard navigation support is currently missing (no KeyEvents on the custom Canvas), but if you have a wheel mouse you really should try this out. There are a couple of locations on earth that have a pretty scary resolution.

Enschede, my home town, isn’t one of those locations at this moment. But I am not sure I am very sad about it. It seems we have to get used to the fact that people will be able to watch everything from everywhere in the near future.

GNU Classpath 0.90 got imported into libgcj providing some nice new features. Still some small issues to cleanup, but most of the worked was just merging, compiling and testing things.

Some picures from GNU Classpath & Friends at Fosdem, and the meeting in A La Mort Subite are online. The pictures clearly show everybody had a very good time :)

Roman finished the last Ocean theme support in GNU Classpath cvs and has switched the default for Metal to it.

It certainly looks cool. But I think all the gradients on the components are a bit distracting compared with the old theme.

GNU Classpath 0.90 “A La Mort Subite” released

At our GNU Classpath and Friends meeting during Fosdem a lot of cool demos were given that showed what is possible with GNU Classpath now. So we decided to push out a new release so everybody can play with all the new stuff (0.90 works out of the box with jamvm 1.4.2 or cacao 0.95). Some highlights:

JTables can be rearranged and resized. Free Swing text components support highlighting and clipboard. Much improved styled text. Fast event dispatching and lower memory consumption. Better support for mixing lightweight and heavyweight components in AWT containers. GNU Crypto and Jessie cryptographic algorithms have been added providing ssl3/tls1 and https support. Unicode 4.0.0 support. GIOP and RMI stub and tie source code tools. XML validaton support for RELAX NG and W3C XML schemas. New file backend for util.prefs. Updated gnu.regexp from POSIX to util.regex syntax.

But the most exciting thing must be that MegaMek started working. That will surely boost the productivity of our GNU Classpath hackers :)

GCC 4.1 released

GCC 4.1 was finally released today. The gcj support is based on a slightly older GNU Classpath snapshot but it does include some really cool changes, new features, and fixes. You can read some more about it in an article I wrote a while ago on the GCJ part. “A look at GCJ 4.1“.

I am looking for similar overviews for the other parts of the GNU Compiler Collection. Dear lazyweb, please let me know if there are some high-level articles on the 4.1 changes in the general optimizer, c, c++, fortran, ada, objective-c[++] frontends, and new target support. There is so much going on around GCC that it is hard to keep up.