Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Maintenance release of the Time2 Library

Version 1.1.4 of the Time2 Library was released on March 21, 2012 at http://time2.sourceforge.net/ and http://agent.ch/timeseries/t2/.

This maintenance release is plug-compatible with the previous version of the software. The internal management of diagnostic messages and exceptions has been improved in three ways:

  1. Diagnostic messages are fetched and formatted only when actually needed. This improves performance, especially in the case where not all messages are logged by the application environment.
  2. The library has now its own exception type, T2Exception. Because it is a subclass of the exception type used previously there is no compatibility issue.
  3. Messages are now keyed symbolically instead of literally. This provides many benefits to the programmer. One of these is readily visible in the Eclipse IDE where the text of the diagnostic message is displayed as a tooltip when the mouse pointer idles over a message key. The screenshot below shows this in action.

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As an aside, the snapshot shows a piece of JUnit testing code. Writing software is easier and faster with test-first development. JUnit is a simple and powerful testing pattern for Java. We can thank Beck and Gamma for it. Note that the original idea was developed for Smalltalk by Kent Beck in 1989 and thus predates Java.

Coming soon

A data management system for time series running on top of the Time2 Library is in the pipeline. I hope to release it one of these weeks...

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