[Bitcoin-development] [ANNOUNCE] BitCoinJ 0.3

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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Perhaps a bit off-topic for this list, maybe there should be a
software/services announcements list? Anyway ...

I'm happy to announce version 0.3 of the leading Java implementation of the
Bitcoin protocol. BitCoinJ is a widely used library that forms the
foundation of projects as diverse as the Android Bitcoin
Wallet<https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet&hl=en>,
the p2p network status graphs <http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/>,
MultiBit<http://multibit.org/>
, PoolServerJ <http://poolserverj.org/> and more.

You can get it either from our Maven
repository<http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/wiki/UsingMaven>or the
downloads
section <http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/downloads/list> of the website.

New in this release:

   - Many bugfixes, robustness and test suite improvements.
   - Major optimizations to reduce parsing overhead, most protocol messages
   are now parsed on demand.
   - A new PeerGroup API that handles the management of multiple peer
   connections.
   - Switched to using Maven for the build process, removed the bundled
   Bouncy Castle as a result. You can now depend on BitCoinJ using Maven if
   you don't need any special patches.
   - A bunch of new APIs to make writing Bitcoin apps easier.

This release would not have been possible without the major contributions
from:

*Steve Coughlan*, who contributed many parsing improvements and
optimizations
*Miron Cuperman*, who did significant work on the PeerGroup API
*Andreas Schildbach*, developer of the Android wallet, who as always
reported many bugs and useful suggestions for improvement
*Gary Rowe and Jonny Hegheim*, who set up the continuous build and Maven
infrastructure

What's next? The next release will focus on "more of the same", that is,
fixing bugs and filling out missing features so projects using the library
don't feel any need to patch their local copy of the library. By popular
request we'll be switching from Subversion to git. We'll also introduce a
stable wallet format that isn't dependent on Java serialization, and
timestamp key creation to resolve some issues with clients that ship block
chain copies. And finally of course, whatever is contributed by the
community.

thanks
/mike

-- 
Google Switzerland GmbH

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