IcedTea 1.8 released

[Andrew John Hughes]

We are proud to announce the release of IcedTea 1.8.

The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from
OpenJDK[7] (http://openjdk.java.net) using Free Software build tools and
a number of additional features including a web plugin, Web Start support
and support for additional architectures via Zero/Shark or the CACAO VM.
More information on IcedTea can be found at http://icedtea.classpath.org

What's New?
==========
  IcedTea is based on the hard work of a lot of people that contributed to
  IcedTea6 and OpenJDK. The following noteworthy changes were added in
  this release:

- Updated to b39 build.
- Support for external projects (closures, caciocavallo, cvmi, bsd, nio2).
  Note that these are based on Mercurial repositories so may require local
  changes for a working build due to noticeable differences between the
  repository and the reference OpenJDK b39 build.  At the time of release,
  NIO2 was buildable out of the box.
- Fixed to use new sound service, Gervill.
- Many Netx fixes and now built by default.
- LiveConnect support replaces gcjwebplugin.
- Implemented JavaScript->Java security.
- PulseAudio integrated (--enable-pulse-java)
- VisualVM tool integrated (--enable-visualvm).
- Added out-of-the-box CACAO support (--with-cacao).
- Added the experimental Shark JIT for Zero.
- Cleaned up crypto support, all algorithms and key sizes are fully
  supported now without any (regional) restrictions. No more need for
  separate crypto policy jars.
- Integration of Mozilla Rhino javascript support for javax.script.
  (See http://icedtea.classpath.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=179 when
   you want to enable non-system-installed versions of Rhino).
- Add support for Zero builds on alpha, arm, mips, mipsel, m68k, s390.
- Various build fixes.
- Several bug and security fixes.
- Plugin including LiveConnect support built as default.
- Various bugs fixed: renderer patch, version string updated,
chinese fonts filename fix for Fedora etc.
- More progress on Shark and Cacao.
- Several plugin bug fixes.
- Several build fixes.

—————–

The tarball can be downloaded here:

http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/source/icedtea-1.8.tar.gz

The following people helped with this release:
Lillian Angel, Gary Benson, Deepak Bhole, Alon Bar-Lev, Tom Callaway,
Pablo del Campo, Thomas Fitzsimmons,  Dennis Gilmore, Andrew Haley,
Andrew John Hughes, Ioana Ivan, Matthias Klose, DJ Lucas, Omair Majid,
Xerxes Ranby, Marc Schoenefeld, Keith Seitz, Joshua Sumali, Christian
Thalinger and Mark Wielaard.
We would also like to thank the bug reporters and testers!

Full build requirements and instructions can be found in the INSTALL
file in the top-level directory of the release. However,

$ ./configure
$ make

should be a good start.
-- 
Andrew :-)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: 94EFD9D8 (http://subkeys.pgp.net)
Fingerprint: F8EF F1EA 401E 2E60 15FA  7927 142C 2591 94EF D9D8