Project Update

[Greg Brail]

Rhino people --

Thanks to the many contributions that have been made over the last few years, we have made a new progress and I'd like to plan for a new release.

Right now, the version in "master" is "1.8.0-SNAPSHOT," and it has a lot of new things:

• Lots of compatibility improvements in built-in objects, including Array, Date and String
• Fixes to the AST code that allow it to be used outside Rhino to parse JavaScript
• Typed arrays
• Ability to set "external array data" on any object from Java code (to be merged soon)
• Support for V8 Error extensions, including "captureStackTrace"
• Removed legacy "XML Beans"-based E4X implementation
• Removed support for Java versions prior to 1.6

The current code base will allow us to replace what is in the "apigee/rhino" project as well.

As such, I'd like to release this soon. So the proposal is this:

1. Release the current code in "master" as "1.7.6", probably late next week
2. Begin working on 1.8.0, which will include many of the features that are sitting in pull requests and which will give us many more ES6 features

The wrinkle is that I had called the current version "1.8.0-SNAPSHOT" in the POM file, but I think that "1.7.6" is a better number for the next release since it causes no backward compatibility issues (unless you were running on Java 1.4 or 1.5, in which case the old releases are not gone).

In particular, it allows us to reserve "1.8.0" for bigger changes. For instance, long ago @anba made a big series of patches that fix many issues with ES5 compatibility, but they require some changes to the public Java API. 1.8.0 would be an opportunity to work some of them in.

Finally, there are plenty of open issues in GitHub now, many of them feature requests. I can find time personally for a few of them, but the vast majority are only going to get implemented by others. 

So, if you have time, or are looking for an OSS project to contribute to, we have a good opportunity here. The missing features are well-specified (in ES6), they already have comprehensive test suites (we can use test suites from the V8 project) and in many cases they map the JavaScript spec to things that the Java platform can already do well.

So tell your friends ;-) I'm happy to review, test, and assign issues to individuals who are interested!

--

greg brail | apigee | twitter @gbrail