Sun Dec 5 18:30:59 PST 1999

Moved fastjar to sourceforge.

I've uploaded the source to the CVS repository, setup the forums and a pair of mailing lists, and moved the web site over. Everything should be in order. A big thanks to VA Linux for putting together this service!

Tue Oct 12 13:05:15 PDT 1999

Fastjar version 0.86 released. This is just 0.85 with a patch applied to fix the leading "./" in the filenames. Fastjar should now be more compatible with other JAR programs.

6/11/1999 13:54 PST

Well, another school year has drawn to a close, and my machine is being packed up and sent to a place where there are no free T1s. =( I've mirrored the site on a stable machine for the summer. Hopefully I'll continue to update fastjar, I have a few patches/bug fixes to release, but haven't gotten around to it due to finals etc. On a more positive note, I think I passed my classes this term...

5/10/1999 22:11 PST

Whoa! I just realized when I ran the tests comparing the performance of Sun's jar vs. fastjar I was using a JIT. I just tried the Sun tool on my 10MB reference archive, and it took over 3 minutes! So on my machine, fastjar is about 45x faster w/ a JIT, and 200x faster w/o one.

5/10/1999 02:24 PST

Version 0.85 released. Hooray! The -x and -t flags now work for extracting and listing the contents of JAR archives respectively. Once again, fastjar's usage page should describe their usage adequately. I should make a man page for fastjar though. Perhaps in the next release. All that's left before the big 1.0 is the -u flag, and making sure fastjar handles manifest files 100% correctly.

4/27/1999 03:26 PST

Version 0.75 released. The -C flag now works for changing directories while adding files. See the fastjar usage page for more information. There are now install/uninstall targets to the Makefile, and the summary report tells you the total compression for the entire jar archive at the end.

4/27/1999 03:26 PST

Version 0.71 released. I added a -V flag that will display the current version. I also improved the error messages given when files don't exist etc. The biggest change is that there is now a configure script to automatically generate a Makefile, so hopefully fastjar will be more portable. Lastly, I changed a couple of things to make fastjar compile on AIX without having to hack the Makefile.

4/25/1999 19:51 PST

Version 0.70 released. Compression now works flawlessly as far as I can determine. It was a huge pain to get it working, unfortunately. I had to find an undocumented feature of zlib before it would even work properly. I hadn't ever tested fastjar very thoroughly with using stdout until this version. It works both piping the output to sun's jar tool, or redirecting the output to a file and viewing it then. The bad news is that compression has slowed down fastjar quite a bit. The archive I've been testing with, the java 1.2 classes, used to take 1 second without compression, and now takes almost 11 seconds with. Oh well, so much for the fast part of fastjar.. For you speedfreaks, the -0 (zero) flag will disable compression.

4/21/1999 21:30 PST

Version 0.60 released. You can now specify an external manifest file to be added with the -m flag, or specify that no manifest file should be used at all with the -M flag. If neither -m or -M are used, fastjar will make a manifest file for you (currently empty beyond the header). This version also contains the bug-fix for that date/time mixup in the central header.

4/21/1999 12:01 PST

Well, linuxberg picked up fastjar from freshmeat and gave it 5 penguins (out of 5). Wow! Not bad for a .5 release. I found a small bug in the code last night. Nothing big, it just switches the time/date in the central header. Shouldn't cause any problems, it'll just look weird if you view the file with "unzip -v". I'm about halfway done with the manifest code, so hopefully a fix plus manifest support will be available by the end of the day.

4/21/1999 02:32 PST

Well, I think that the new nicer-looking web page is fully functional. I stole most of the design from a webpage for a previous project, but who's counting... It must be morning in Europe, because I'm seeing quite a few downloads from Germany, France etc. right now..

4/20/1999

Some very nice person sent me a patch for fastjar to fix a small bug with file closure. I've released the patched version as 0.50.1 which is available from the download section. I also made an announcement on Freshmeat for this version, but it hasn't shown up yet.

4/20/1999

Version 0.50 relased to Freshmeat.