[Bluej-announce] Release: BlueJ 1.3.0 beta 3

[Michael Kölling]

Dear BlueJ users,

I am writing to announce the release of BlueJ 1.3.0 beta 3.

Usually we do not use this list to make announcements for beta releases 
(just for finals), but I hope you will excuse an exception in this case.

In this version of BlueJ, the debugger has been completely 
reimplemented. This is a substantial change, and we would like to get 
as much beta feedback as we can to ensure a high quality of the next 
release.

The remainder of this mail contains some details about the new release. 
You can download, as always, from

    http://www.bluej.org

Regards,

Michael Kölling
-- 
Michael Kölling                                       Mærsk Institute
http://www.mip.sdu.dk/~mik             University of Southern Denmark


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BLUEJ 1.3.0 BETA 3 RELEASE NOTES

In BlueJ, all execution is always performed on what is internally known 
as 'the debugger'. The debugger is a dedicated virtual machine that 
runs the user code, and can also perform debugging operations. Thus, 
the debugger re-implementation affects not only debugging 
functionality, but all execution of user code.

The reason for this re-implementation was mainly to remove some 
long-standing problems with debugging. Some of the most visible changes 
are:

- BlueJ now uses one separate VM for each open project. Thus, if only 
one project is open in BlueJ, memory requirements will be the same as 
in older versions of BlueJ. With multiple projects open at the same 
time, BlueJ will consume more memory (about 8Mb per additional project).

- The project's virtual machine is now started at the time of opening a 
project (not at the time of starting BlueJ). This makes starting BlueJ 
faster, and opening projects slower. However, work on a project 
(editing, compiling) can be started immediately after opening a 
project, while the VM starts up in parallel in the background.

- Debugging multi-threaded applications (including Swing/AWT 
applications) should work much more reliably than in previous versions. 
Well, essentially, it should work now, while before it didn't.

- The user VM can now be restarted. One way is to use the 'Terminate' 
button in the debugger window - it restarts the machine. Secondly, 
there is now a contextual menu (right-click popup menu) on the barber 
pole. It has two entries: 'Show Debugger' and 'Reset Machine'. The 
'Reset Machine' function has a key shortcut: Shift-Ctrl-R. In other 
words: if a user program does something unexpected, and you want to 
kill it, hitting Shift-Ctrl-R resets the VM it is running on.

- The current directory for user applications is now the project 
directory. As a side effect of using multiple VMs we can now set the 
directory as many users expect it.


This is a major implementation change, and there are bound to be some 
initial problems. We would very much appreciate any feedback you might 
have to remove possible bugs before final release. Your help in this 
will be very valuable in order to reach full release quality quickly.