IcedTea-Web 1.6 released!

[Jiri Vanek]

Hi All!

After some year of peaceful development, IcedTea-Web 1.6 is going to see an wide audience.

http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.6.tar.gz
md5sum
e5c3d732bf874a2b474f97a3f394b680  icedtea-web-1.6.tar.gz
sha256sum
169386ad8d43c51b0c23ef128f9ba99040d23d9ceec24d7429514576778e117d  icedtea-web-1.6.tar.gz

Looking to the news[1], not much happened. Some bugfixes, some features, It does not look like year 
of development.Anyway, few highlights.:

* Most visible first - new documentation:
   Whole documentation of ITW now goes from single source and is accurate. Available are new 
manpages and new runtime (both gui and cmdline help) help. The online version can be seen here:
   http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/icedtea-web-docs/1.6/html/
   The runtime documentation have one difference from static docs - the variables expanded and 
properties shows current version. So you know much better now, what ITW is doing.

* best technical highlights second:
  - runtime and built time support  for jdk 7,8, and 9
  - new parser of cmdline args. Not everybody will appreciate, but now parser is is really telling 
you whats wrong with your args (yah, finally!:) And it is close connected to docs and with ...
  - ... bash completion

Funny features on the top of things. You can read some advertising I did on Fosdem and on Devconf :
  https://jvanek.fedorapeople.org/fosdem/itwGoesOffline-4014/itwGoesOfflineAndBeyond.pdf
* Run in sandbox and custom policy editor were heavily improved. Hopefully more fun will come in 1.7
* -html switch for javaws. This is actually replacement for old legacy appeltviwer. Little bit 
better and with regular sandbox.  And allowing you a lot of fun from single htmlpage. If napapi will 
die out of browsers, this should be straight-forward replacement. I believe that ppapi (or any 
other) plugin can be written for this pretty easily.
* desktop integration - you can now create desktop or menu launcher for any applet/javaws app you 
met. For applications which do not offer you this, you have to enable itweb-settings->Desktop 
inegration -> "ask user". Although offline capabilities were really improved,  Still something to 
fix here.


*Feature*
Looking onto http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web#Future_IcedTea-Web_tasks I think not much 
wil be done for 1.7 Probably rememberable  dialogues, javascript for -html and gui for desktop 
integration. We well see... And I'm not sure will do it all :)


*Special thanks*
This time hugest thank you goes to community - to all people which contributed once or twice, but 
always the best.  Second hugest thank you go to people on Fosdem and Devconf who really gave me 
feeling taht ITW is still wonted and work on it good and desired.


Thank you!
  Best regards from CZ,
   J.

[1]
New in release 1.6 (2015-04-29):
* Massively improved offline abilities. Added Xoffline switch to force work without inet connection.
* Improved to be able to run with any JDK
* JDK 6 and older no longer supported
* JDK 8 support added (URLPermission granted if applicable)
* JDK 9 supported
* Added support for Entry-Point manifest attribute
* Added KEY_ENABLE_MANIFEST_ATTRIBUTES_CHECK deployment property to control scan of Manifest file
* starting arguments now accept also -- abbreviations
* Added new documentation
* Added support for menu shortcuts - both javaws applications/applets and html applets are supported
* added support for -html switch for javaws. Now you can run most of the applets without browser at all
* Control Panel
   - PR1856: ControlPanel UI improvement for lower resolutions (800*600)
* NetX
   - PR1858: Java Console accepts multi-byte encodings
   - PR1859: Java Console UI improvement for lower resolutions (800*600)
   - RH1091563: [abrt] icedtea-web-1.5-2.fc20: Uncaught exception java.lang.ClassCastException in 
method sun.applet.PluginAppletViewer$8.run()
   - Dropped support for long unmaintained -basedir argument
   - Returned support for -jnlp argument
   - RH1095311, PR574 -  References class sun.misc.Ref removed in OpenJDK 9 - fixed, and so 
buildable on JDK9
* Plugin
   - PR1743 - Intermittant deadlock in PluginRequestProcessor
   - PR1298 - LiveConnect - problem setting array elements (applet variables) from JS
   - RH1121549: coverity defects
   - Resolves method overloading correctly with superclass heirarchy distance
* PolicyEditor
   - codebases can be renamed in-place, copied, and pasted
   - codebase URLs can be copied to system clipboard
   - displays a progress dialog while opening or saving files
   - codebases without permissions assigned save to file anyway (and re-appear on next open)
   - PR1776: NullPointer on save-and-exit
   - PR1850: duplicate codebases when launching from security dialogs
   - Fixed bug where clicking "Cancel" on the "Save before Exiting" dialog could result in the editor
     exiting without saving changes
   - Keyboard accelerators and mnemonics greatly improved
   - "File - New" allows editing a new policy without first selecting the file to save to
* Common
   - PR1769: support signed applets which specify Sandbox permissions in their manifests
* Temporary Permissions in security dialog now multi-selectable and based on PolicyEditor permissions