Changes Since the Last Release

• Added a STOP button. This button cancels the fetching of a page or image; it doesn't affect applets.
• Editable text fields now have white backgrounds.
• Buttons look different.
• Applets can now write to files, as determined by your write path. By default, the write path is empty. For security reasons, an applet won't be loaded from a filesystem that is writable by applets.
• Added an experimental version of a Progress Monitor (available through the Options menu).
• Implemented the gopher protocol.
• Changed the default font from 17 point to 14 point.
• User documentation updated to include new Alpha3 features. Also, the documentation hierarchy has been reorganized. The Documentation Home Page now has links to the latest draft documentation and to the user documentation.
• Mail composition and message posting dialogs now have a "From" field that lets you enter your e-mail address.
• The mail composition window has a "Cc" field.
• Submitting a form via a mailto URL causes a confirmation dialog to appear.
• News protocol handling works better now.
• Added suspend/resume feature to the ImageLoopItem applet. Click the applet's display area to suspend/resume the animation.
• When a documentation file doesn't exist on the user's system, HotJava now looks for the document under http://java.sun.com/1.0alpha3. (Last release, it looked under 1.0alpha2.) You can override which directory (instead of 1.0alpha3) HotJava looks under by setting the HOTJAVA_RELEASE environment variable.

• The Java Language Specification has been revised. It's now clearer, describes the new language features (listed below), and has a new appendix that formally describes the Java grammar.
• Java language changes:
  • Added a new declaration syntax for arrays, which makes it easier to declare a method that returns an array:

    int[] i;
    int[] method();
    

  • Both catch and finally are now allowed in a single try statement:

    try{...}catch(e){...}finally{...}
    

  • Allow trailing ',' in static array initializers.
• Added double-buffering to allow you to improve animation performance. You do this by creating an image and drawing to it directly using a Graphics object. Double-buffering is NOT backwards compatibile -- applets that use it can't be executed by the Alpha2 release of the HotJava browser. You can work around this with code such as the following:

  class MyApplet extends Applet {
      Image		im;
      Graphics	offscreen;
  
      public void init() {
      	...
      	resize(400, 500); // or whatever
      	...
  
      	try {
      	   im = createImage(width, height);
      	   offscreen = new Graphics(im);
      	} catch (Exception e) {
      	   // double-buffering not available
      	   offscreen = null;
      	}
      }
  
      public void paintApplet(Graphics g) {
      	... code to paint your applet ...
      }
  
      public void update(Graphics g) {
      	paint(g);
      }
  
      public void paint(Graphics g) {
      	if (offscreen != null) { 
              // double-buffering available
  	    paintApplet(offscreen);
  	    g.drawImage(im, 0, 0);
  	} else {
              // no double-buffering
  	    paintApplet(g);
  	}
      }
  
      public void destroy() {
      	if (offscreen != null) {
              offscreen.dispose();
  	    im.dispose();
  	}
      }
  }
  

• New font metrics interfaces (awt.FontMetrics). The metrics interfaces in awt.Font will go away in the beta release.
• javah has been changed, so that the process of writing native methods has been simplified. The javah man page has been updated to reflect these changes.
• Made static initializer public so the URL class can be used from outside the net.www.html package.
• Date: deals with timezone-independent times; can deal with GMT.
• System: added a time-of-day method that actually works.
• Fixed Color class so you can initialize it without having a WServer object around.
• Switched to dithering intensities instead of RGB on grayscale displays. This is a big improvement in image quality on mono and grayscale displays.
• Made Socket.connect method public (with some security checks of course).
• Improved support for doubles and long long's on machines that insist these be 8-byte aligned. (This change is visible only to porters.)
• Added support for binding a socket to any local address. Creating an InetAddress with a hostname of null means "any of the local machine's network addresses."
• Fixed a core dumper in the Date class.
• Fixed a javah bug that caused byte, char and short fields to be majorly messed up.
• Compiler/run-time fixes:
  • >>=, <<=, >>>= were not compiling properly for longs.
  • Compiler didn't like unused variables with array initialize.
  • Methods and ivars were confused.
  • String += object didn't work.
  • Wrapping code in a try-finally caused undefined variable error.
  • Null Pointer exception in compiler when compiling 0.0/0.0.
  • Class resolution deadlock.
  • Compiler didn't accept 0X1 and 0x1L.
  • javac not multi-thread safe.
  • Compiler did not insist that the package be the first thing in the file.
• Added the following classes and interfaces:

  In awt:

  FontMetrics

  In java.io:

  StringBufferPrintStream, StringInputStream, TextInputStream

  In java.util:

  BASE64Decoder, BASE64Encoder, BitSet, CRC16, Cache, CharacterDecoder, CharacterEncoder, HexDumpEncoder, UCDecoder, UCEncoder, UUDecode, UUEncoder, CEFormatException, CEStreamExhausted, EmptyStackException