JEF-0.4.0-alpha
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:
1. we perform a simple check aimed to verify that all the references to constant pool table entries exposed by one of the class file data structure are valid. This kind of validation roughly maps itself to the first step required by the Java Virtual Machine Official Specification (§ 4.9.1)
2. we verify all the Code_attribute instances against their static constraints specified by the Java Virtual Machine Official Specification (§ 4.8.1). At the moment we only adhere to a really small subset of all the required steps: we simply verify the first four documented static constraints on the bytecode instructions in the code array of each Code_attribute. In the next release we'll improve this feature by adding the two missing steps related to the validation of static constraints on the bytecode instructions. At the moment we have not scheduled anything about the validation of the static constraints on the operands of bytecode instructions.
As stated before we have already fixed a lot of javadoc comments in order to be able to provide you with a more usable and useful documentation.
The JXTA-Jef subproject still remains freezed for the same reasons highlighted in the previous release.
The whole JEF-Dna subproject has been finally moved to Tiger, thus you are required to download and install Java 5 before working with JEF.
Releases
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
