RText 2.0.6 was just released! Â Here’s a rundown of the major changes:
Syntax highlighting and code folding for JSON. Â Folks doing a lot of work with web applications will appreciate this.
Improvements to the UI when a Substance Look and Feel is installed. Â All trees and lists now use Substance’s striping and rollover effects, and colors used in miscellaneous custom components were tweaked to better fit in with the current Substance skin.
Fixed a ClassCastException when adding a JRE in the Java options panel. Â This was bug 3600567, and was accidentally introduced with the last refactoring of the Java language support.
Updated the Turkish and French localizations. Â Thanks to Burak and Pat!
A major side effect of the improved Substance support is that compilation is now done in two phases. Â RText has always only required Java 1.4, but Substance requires Java 6 or newer (we’re actually shipping with Insubstantial, which is an active fork of Substance, since the original author stopped working on it). Â To get around this, all of the “core” RText classes are built with Java 1.4, and all of the classes requiring Substance are built with Java 6; these classes are only referenced from the application via reflection to avoid a hard dependency. Â If Java 1.4 or Java 5 is detected, RText will never load anything Substance related.
When will RText drop support for 1.4? Â Probably not for awhile, especially when I can easily use functionality in newer versions easily enough via reflection as I’m currently doing (and only then for Substance, opening a browser/system editors for files, and for the scripting API). Â And performance improvements are received via simply running in a newer JVM, not from compiling with one. Â Perhaps when Java 8 GA is released this September, it might be time to consider moving to Java 5. Â 🙂
Anyway, the list of new features going into the next release is already growing! Â More on that soon.