Thermostat 0.4 Released

[Jon VanAlten]

Hi all,

The Thermostat development team would like for you to now enjoy:

Thermostat 0.4: The Martian Chronicles[*]

You can download this pre-release at:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/download/thermostat/thermostat-0.4.0.tar.gz

We have numerous new galaxy-class features to share:
 * A shiny new major.minor.micro-qualifier version format.
 * Authentication support
    * When user has keyring enabled for their desktop, authentication
      parameters can be saved.
 * Heap tools
    * Searching heap contents for objects.
    * Finding all GC roots, or GC root for a specific object.
    * The above is supported both on CLI and GUI clients.
 * Thread tools
    * Optionally active thread data collection, activated remotely via GUI.
    * Display of various thread data.
 * Webservice
    * Storage provided as web interface.  Experimental, not enabled by default.
 * Eclipse plugin
    * The beginnings of Eclipse integration.
 * Dolphin L&F
    * Support for some new components, including tables and toggle buttons.

Some improvements might be of the most interest to developers:
 * Ongoing refinements to the use of OSGi.
    * Various components provided as services, rather than requiring the
      use of singletons/factories/otherfoobar.
 * Command-channel
    * Support for sending commands to the agent.
    * Remote actions can be added as part of a plugin by implementing an
      interface and registering as OSGi service.
    * Used already for triggering heap dumps and activating thread support.
 * Compatible with older (1.8 or earlier) mongodb versions.

Other improvements worth highlighting:
 * Heap histogram is much nicer.
 * Storage layer
    * Most Pojo/DAO are now using annotations and ChunkAdapter to avoid
      creating as many short-term, garbage-collected objects.
 * At this point, I could start listing off GUI improvements, but this
   would delay the release by another 3 days.  Because there are *that*
   *many* GUI improvements.  If you would like to know the full details
   do feel free to read the commit history.  Otherwise, start up the
   improved Thermostat gui and bask in its beautiful glory.  Sizing,
   colors, consistency across views, tweaks to theming, all contribute
   to a great-looking result for this pre-release.

The following people contributed during this release cycle:

Severin Gehwolf
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:

Elliott Baron
Deepak Bhole
Danesh Dadachanji
Adam Domurad
Saad Mohammad
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

[*] Yes, we are keeping with the works of fiction theme, and this time
    are referencing real books again!  The code name discussion for this
    round happened to correspond with the recent rover landing, and
    being rather inspired by the amazing science that is behind current
    Mars exploration efforts this one was a no-brainer.