JNode 0.2.8 (FOSDEM edition)

Earlier last week JNode 0.2.8 was released. We could also call it the yearly FOSDEM release, which used to happen sometime before this much anticipated free software conference. Unfortunately FOSDEM attendance didn't work out for me this year because I had to cancel the whole trip in the last minute due to a sudden illness. So, my meeting with four other JNode developers and with other free Java developers, my JNode talk & demo and watching quite a few interesting presentations, important for my future work on JNode, didn't happen. Fortunately Peter still made the JNode talk, so our allocated time slot was not lost and I hope the presentations from other talks and maybe several videos will be available soon on the website. I plan to share certain information about JNode in the upcoming blog posts perhaps in more detail than they could have been in my talk.

Regarding JNode 0.2.8, it has many stability improvements backed by Mauve based regression tests and bug fixes but no major completed new features this time, though we made progress with isolates, bjorne shell, and hfs+ file system support among others (see release notes). These features should be available in the upcoming one or two releases.
Improvements in the GUI have made JNode capable of running JEdit as you can see in the screenshot. Most features are working in it, but editing is still hard to use due to problems in the underlaying font support in JNode.

Also the result of general improvents is that besides the recent Servlet and JSP examples PHP code is starting work under JNode by the means of Jetty and the pure Java PHP engine, Quercus. Based on this stack we want to set up an experimental version of the jnode.org portal (which is based on Drupal) as a step towards powering jnode.org by a fully JNode based system sometime in the future.