Deepak’s Blog

IcedTea-Web 1.0.3 has been released and is available for download now.

This is a regular maintenance release and contains some nice-to-have plugin bug fixes:

• PR721: IcedTeaPlugin.so cannot run g_main_context_iteration on a different thread unless a different GMainContext *context is used
• PR735: Firefox 4 sometimes freezes if the applet calls showDocument()
• RH691259: Midori sends a SIGSEGV with the IcedTea NP Plugin

If you are using IcedTea-Web 1.0.x with Firefox, it is recommended that you update to 1.0.3 as it is significantly more stable on Firefox 4.

Available for download here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.0.3.tar.gz

Build instructions are here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#Building_IcedTea-Web

SHA256 sum:
2a3b907b471a67fdbae4ecc80b8425dfc7533e91f63f622d91501d4a64f07581 icedtea-web-1.0.3.tar.gz

Thanks to Omair Majid for helping with this release (patch reviews)!

IcedTea-Web 1.1 has been branched! A list of features/fixes in 1.1 are in the NEWS file here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.1/file/tip/NEWS

If you are the adventurous type and would like to help us try/test it, checkout, build and usage instructions are here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/?title=IcedTea-Web#Getting_IcedTea-Web

Instead of checking out from http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea-web (trunk), just use http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/release/icedtea-web-1.1/

The 1.1 release is tentatively scheduled for May 6th 2011 and we will be fixing any major issues found, until then.

IcedTea-Web 1.0.1 has been released. This is a security fix only release and addresses a couple of security issues.

What’s new in 1.0.1:

• S6983554, CVE-2010-4450: Launcher incorrect processing of empty library path entries
• RH677332, CVE-2011-0706: IcedTea multiple signers privilege escalation

The following people helped with this release:
Omair Majid (code), Andrew John Hughes (guidance on how to release)

Checksum:
cfcb17e94d6cd406e7aceb08de2ae7c03fe3f2a730829cc5ac54ca6a90a9d46e icedtea-web-1.0.1.tar.gz

Download link:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.0.1.tar.gz

After extracting (tar xzf icedtea-web-1.0.1.tar.gz),  it can be built as per instructions here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#Building_IcedTea-Web

 
A security update is also available for IcedTea6 now.

I am happy to announce the first release of IcedTea-Web!

IcedTea-Web is an addon component to IcedTea. It is open source (GPL + LGPL for
some parts) and provides a Java web browser plugin (IcedTea NP Plugin) and Java
Web Start implementation (i.e. javaws binary, based on NetX and referred to as such). Additionally, release 1.0 also contains an alpha preview of itweb-settings, a GUI tool to control deployment settings for NetX and the plugin.

So what is new in the plugin and NetX in icedtea-web you ask? Well, lots!

Improvements:

• NetX and plugin configuration can now be specified via a deployment.properties file
• System-level as well as user-level deployment.properties files with locked configuration are supported
• Applications and applets can now have a Look and Feel different from rest of IcedTea-Web
• Native directories are correctly cleaned on exit
• Cached files with special characters in file names are now handled correctly
• Interfaces javax.jnlp.IntegrationService and javax.jnlp.DownloadService2 are now available
• javaws now supports a new  -Xclearcache option
• Applications with non-public main classes are now supported.
• JNLP files containing <component-desc> as well as <application-desc> will now work
• JNLP files referenced in the applet tag are now parsed to detect applet properties
• Applets are now double-buffered to eliminate flicker in ones that do heavy drawing

Bug fixes:

• PR592: NetX can create invalid desktop entry files
• PR542: Plugin fails with NPE http://www.openprocessing.org
• PR552: Support for FreeBSD’s pthread implementation
• PR554: System.err writes content two times
• PR556: Applet initialization code is prone to race conditions
• PR557: Applet opens in a separate window if tab is closed when the applet loads
• PR565: UIDefaults.getUI fails with jgoodies:looks 2.3.1
• PR593: Increment of invalidated iterator in IcedTeaPluginUtils
• PR597: Entities are parsed incorrectly in PARAM tag in applet plugin
• PR619: Improper finalization by the plugin can crash the browser
• RH665104: OpenJDK Firefox Java plugin loses a cookie

It can be downloaded here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.0.tar.gz

Build instructions are here:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#Building_IcedTea-Web

SHA256 sum:
e33413768cdf2ffce66aaff00fed5dd06deb09ed7eb28e522cdad4f29b78e594  icedtea-web-1.0.tar.gz

A big thanks to Andrew John Hughes, Omair Majid and Andrew Su for helping make this happen!

IcedTea 1.8 is now out. It officially replaces the old IcedTea Plugin with the new NPRuntime based plugin.

A significant number of fixes went in since the NP plugin version in 1.7. Some of the biggest ones are:

• Memory on C++ side is all correctly managed now
• Speed has been improved over previous version
• An arbitrary number applets can initialize in parallel without causing a spike in thread count
• Support for /home on AFS and others filesystems that don’t support FIFO pipes
• Support for Chromium and Firefox running *at the same time*

If you had been apprehensive about trying it out because it wasn’t finalized before, give it a try now!

With improved cross-browser API support thanks to the Mozilla/Sun/Chromium teams, last week I decided to take a break from functionality development and focus on browser compatibility for the new NP plugin. And here is the end result .. the plugin working with Chromium!

In addition to Chromium, the plugin also works with Firefox 3.6 A1 now.

It is the only Java plugin that works with Chromium at the moment. Proxy and cookie support won’t be there with Chromium as the APIs haven’t been implemented on the browser side yet. When they are, the plugin should be able to make use of them seamlessly.

All code is in mercurial: http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea6/rev/8353f4e67ec1

Just a side note: To use it with Chromium/FF3.6, it needs to be built against xulrunner 1.9.2 Alpha* as that contains headers with the new API. Also, chormium build from 20090824 (rev. 24148) or higher is needed to make use of Liveconnect.

I remember when I first took over the old plugin. A little while before that, Tom had posted on his blog about getting the Facebook image uploader applet working with the IcedTea Plugin. This was a huge achievement because of the complex support that is required to make it work. So for the rewrite, I decided to chase that goal too, and I am happy to say that NPPlugin can now load the Facebook image uploader applet!

Infact not just Facebook, but Yahoo! games, JigZone, and a variety of other sites now work. In addition to new functionality support, other improvements include:

– Significant speed improvements. Unlike the IcedTeaPlugin which suffered from an initial lag during the first liveconnect call for an instance due to OJI and other limitations, the new one is instantaneous.

– Unicode support is done, and everything uses UTF-8 now.

Oh and for anyone following the dates, the plugin *needed* to be done by around March 2010 until a while ago: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/0198421f054e29f8

However, Namoroka (Firefox 3.6) which uses Gecko 1.9.2 is now due around November ’09:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Namoroka

So that is now the new date by which the new plugin *needs* to be done. As my friend and colleague Andrew would say (or so I picture in my head), “good times”. Good times indeed.

And here are some screen shots of a few new cool applets working with the new plugin:

1: Facebook image uploader applet, after uploading an image:

Facebook Image Uploader and IcedTeaNP Plugin

2: JigZone applet. The Left bar is html, and contains JavaScript that monitors the applet via LiveConnect to determine when to start/stop the timer:

JigZone applet and IcedTeaNP Plugin

3: Yahoo! Games. The black blocks that remove user names were added by me:

Yahoo! Poker game applet and IcedTeaNP Plugin

As usual, all code is upstream: http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea6