Thursday, August 13, 2015

Babbler Version 0.6.0

I am happy to announce the release of version 0.6.0 of the Java XMPP library, which has also been released to Maven Central!

This version is an important milestone because it’s the first version which is written solely for Java 8!

In particular that means, it leverages many of the new Java 8 goodies, most notably the new Date/Time API, Functional Interfaces (e.g. Predicate) and Lambda Expressions and paves the way for future improvements (e.g. Stream API) to keep the library modern.

The legacy Date API (java.util.Date/Calendar/TimeZone) has been replaced by the new java.time package, i.e. Instant, OffsetDateTime and ZoneOffset.

Event Listeners have been replaced by java.util.function.Consumer, which really saved a lot of similar interfaces and thanks to lambdas there isn’t even a syntactical difference.

New Features

A special release highlight is the support for the Jabber Component Protocol, which allows you to write External Components for an XMPP server. So the library isn’t exclusively usable for client development anymore, but now also for server component development! More about that in a future blog post.

Further new features are:

The full changelog with more information can be found here.

The updated documentation can be found here.

Support for XEP-0198: Stream Management is nearly done, but still needs some polishing, so it’s postponed to the next version.

Thanks for everybody who provided feedback and bug reports! I’m happy to hear more from you!