JX 2.5.0
JX 2.5.0 is finally here, and it’s available for free under the LGPL. This means that you can write programs using JX and distribute them any way you like, either for free or as commercial software.
Add comment June 11th, 2006
Code Crusader 5.1
Code Crusader 5.1 is finally finished. In case you haven’t noticed, the release schedule is a bit faster than it has been in recent years. 
You can read about the changes here. One noteworthy improvement is that it now runs on Cygwin!
This release is free for those who have purchased version 5.0. Simply log in to your account on the Downloads page.
Add comment June 11th, 2006
OS X Dashboard Widgets
I just uploaded a significantly improved version of the RSS Reader which allows you to scroll through your favorite blogs, instead of having to sselect them one by one by switching to the back panel.
I also released the Daily Comics reader which remembers your favorite comics and lets you quickly read through them every morning. The engine is flexible enough to handle any daily comic strip that is presented as an image! The package includes an extensive list of known comics, and I will be adding more to the catalog as time permits.
Add comment June 6th, 2006
Cygwin
I finally got Code Crusader and Code Medic to run on Cygwin! I’ll be posting the binaries as soon as Code Crusader 5.1.0 is finished.
Add comment June 6th, 2006
Code Crusader 5.0
Well, it’s finally here. After more than a year of toiling in my spare time, Code Crusader 5.0 is finally a reality. The major new feature from my perspective is true CVS support. I claimed support for CVS in previous versions, but when I finally started using it, I realized that I didn’t really know what I was talking about! Now I’m pretty confident that I do And since Subversion is quite similar to CVS, and I’m using both, I know that the only feature missing, which will be coming soon, is the graphical interface to Subversion’s diff.
Of course, some of you may be more interested in the new languages that are supported, e.g., Eiffel, JavaScript, or Python. Or perhaps the improved PHP support or support for CMake makes you happy. I know some people will be thrilled to finally be able to make their whitespace visible! There are so many smaller improvements that I’ve lost track, but everything is documented in the ChangeLog.
Enjoy!
Add comment March 4th, 2006
Cygwin
I just updated my WinXP laptop to the latest Cygwin and discovered the following issues:
- mkdtemp() is missing from the system libraries.
- seekg() and seekoff() require long long instead of long
- JOutPipeStream generates additional link errors, but this class is scheduled for replacement anyway.
If anybody has any information about how to cope with this, please let us know!
Add comment February 11th, 2006
CVS support in Code Crusader
I finally found the time to finish implementing the new CVS tab in the “Compare files” dialog. It provides the same options as cvs diff. For a single file, the results are displayed the usual way. For a directory, it currently displays the raw output of cvs diff. Ideally, it would display this in a list so you could double click to view the details for any particular file, but that will have to wait for a later release.
We’re planning to move to Subversion soon. Support for svn diff will surely follow quickly.
Add comment December 26th, 2005
Porting JX
The good news, in case you hadn’t noticed, is that our software now runs on both Mac OS and Cygwin — at least, out latest beta does.
Porting our software to Windows 2K/XP has been stalled for a few months now, but the good news is that I recently made a bit more progress by eliminating most of the uses of JInPipeStream. This particular class was originally a good idea, but since it is based on a GNU extension to the C++ stream library which never caught on, it now has to go. I’m replacing it with functions in jStreamUtil.h that operate directly on a file descriptor. Of course, this means that we lose the convenience of the stream in operator (>>), but that seems to be a small price to pay for cross-platform compatibility.
The same fate awaits JOutPipeStream.
On a similar note, since strstream is deprecated, almost all references to it have been replaced with stringstream, and jStrStreamUtil.h is now gone. Personally, I dislike the descision to deprecate strstream, because stringstream always makes copies of the data, and this is a disaster in certain cases where efficiency is critical — though I suppose some would claim that the entire C++ stream library should be avoided when efficiency matters! 
If anybody has any good news about stringstream colluding with string to avoid copying data, please let me know!
Add comment November 29th, 2005
Progress on Code Crusader
Ever since I started using CVS, I’ve been kicking myself for several old design choices:
- Putting too much junk in the .jcc file
- Not tracking whether or not the .jcc file really needs to be saved
- Not making the .jcc file line based so I can get something useful out of CVS diff
Over Thanksgiving, I finally got around to cleaning this up. The .jcc file is now line based, and all the local settings, like window positions, have now been moved to a new .jup file. This clears the way for tracking whether or not the .jcc file needs to be saved — my next weekend project — which in turn will tell me whether or not I really need to check it out from CVS. (I always configure CVS so I only get write permission after I run cvs edit. This makes it easy to find the files that I have changed, especially since Code Crusader now displays the write permission in the project window! )
*.jup can now be added to .cvsignore, just like *.jst. They are both tied to the specific machine on which the code is stored.
Add comment November 29th, 2005
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