Japi Holidays to all!
Nearly a month since I blogged about Japi progress. I must be slipping.
Since then with respect to 1.4:
- As Andrew mentioned in that chat log, he fixed the remaining beancontext issues on December 1st. As far as I know he's still looking for anyone, anywhere, who actually has any code that uses those methods.
- Roman implemented two in datatransfer and one in print on December 11th.
- And two in imageio.stream on December 12th.
- On Christmas Eve Andrew eliminated the last two java.io errors.
- The 1.2/1.3 error is in java.text. Mario is working on this one, I believe. As I understand it, it exposed some deeper Unicode-related issues that need to be addressed first - and will presumably result in improvements elsewhere too.
- Seven in java.security.cert. Not a clue.
- Six more in javax.imageio.stream.
- Two methods, two constructors (and three serialversionuid minor issues) in javax.security.auth.kerberos.
- One more to go (drag'n'drop related) in Swing.
- And since I'm mentioning minor issues, even though I'm not including them in the count: a few more serialversionuid issues in external code that we inherit from the upstream distributors, specifically dom and sax. I believe these have been reported to the upstream suppliers of the code with no results, which is disappointing. Perhaps these won't be fixed until OpenJDK code can be pulled in...
There are certainly also things from 1.4 that lie outside of API coverage that aren't finished. I'm not sure whether there's any definitive list of those things; it's a lot harder to know what they are when you can't write an easy tool like japitools to list them. I think those things are important too - I'm just not in a position to blog what they are. One I encountered in my own development was jks keystore format support.
None of that, though, detracts from the fact that excellent work is being done on 1.5 and 6 support as well, by Andrew and others. The percentage changes don't seem terribly impressive (at the beginning of the month Classpath's generics branch was at 95.5% good, 4.4% missing versus 1.5, and 88.72% good, 11.03% missing versus 6. Now Classpath IS the generics branch and those numbers are 95.56% good, 4.31% missing versus 1.5 and 88.93% good, 10.87% missing versus 6). However, the Java platform these days is HUGE. An improvement of 0.21% reflects quite a lot of work, especially considering that it was all methods in existing classes, and the way Japi weights things, those don't count for much compared to a whole new class, even if the class is small.