Thermostat 0.3 Released!

[Jon VanAlten]

Hi all,

The Thermostat development team is now ready to share with you:

Thermostat 0.3: Not Yet[*]

You can download this release at:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/thermostat/thermostat-0.3.tar.gz

We have added several new features that users will want to check out:
 * Kill Switch: If you observe a java process misbehaving, you can now kill it from within Thermostat
 * Dolphin LAF: A homegrown LAF that we really like.  Soon enough we will move this into a separate project.
 * Heap Dumps
    * Heap dumps can now be triggered from within Thermostat for any observed running Java process.
    * The contents are made available via GridFS in the Mongo database.
    * Also, associated heap contents histograms are generated.
    * This information is viewable in the GUI client, as well as using CLI.
 * New command line commands:
    * vm-stat : Show some runtime stats (cpu, memory usage, etc) of a given JVM.
    * dump-heap : Trigger a heap dump for a specific JVM.
    * list-heap-dumps : Show list of dumps that have already been created.
    * show-heap-histogram : List the classes in the heap, with number of instances and memory used.
    * save-heap-dump-to-file : Pull the heap dump file from mongodb to the local filesystem.
 * UI improvements too numerous to mention.  It just looks and feels a lot better, try and see!

We have also made some improvements that developers will be interested in:
 * We now make use of the felix OSGi implementation.
    * Most of the code base now broken up into OSGi bundles.
    * Various components now managed by bundle lifecycle.
 * Even more MVC separation in the client code base.

Numerous bugs have been fixed, including:
 * PR962: Stale data continues to be added for JVMs after they exit
 * PR972: Bug in test suite: terminal left in partially-broken state
 * PR990: Many UI components show "Missing Information" instead of what should be there.
 * PR992: GC tab not always displaying when selected.
 * PR1001: Only show 'kill-switch' in context menu for live vms
 * PR981: DistributionInformationTest fails on OpenSUSE Linux 12.1
 * PR1046: CLI vm-info display wrong stop time for living vms
 * PR1051: Avoid exceptions when reading /proc/ for dead processes

The following people contributed during this release cycle:

Roman Kennke
Omair Majid
Mario Torre
Jon VanAlten

We would also like to thank the following people, who assisted with testing
and providing feedback during this release cycle:

Deepak Bhole
Danesh Dadachanji
Andrew Haley
Pavel Tisnovsky

And probably others we have missed, but appreciate no less!

Please see below for project information.  If you have tried out Thermostat
and have constructive feedback for us, if you are a Java developer and have
specific use cases not handled yet by Thermostat, or if you would like to
contribute, we would especially like to hear from you via mailing list or
IRC.

URL:           http://icedtea.classpath.org/thermostat
Mailing list:  http://icedtea.classpath.org/mailman/listinfo/thermostat
Repository:    http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/thermostat
IRC:           #thermostat on irc.freenode.com

[*] This deserves some explanation.  Only days before release, the core
    developers asked themselves, "Are we ready to push this release?"
    The answer was, of course, "Not Yet!"  But, we managed to pull things
    together, and we really feel that this is the best release yet.
    Furthermore, our last release code name was a book title (did anyone
    catch that?), and we sort of thought that this was a pattern we would
    continue.  So, naturally, one of us asked "Is 'Not Yet' a book title?"
    The answer, of course, was "Not Yet".  So, this has stuck!  Hope you
    don't mind our little joke.