[Bitcoin-development] bitcoinj 0.10

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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Hello,

I'm pleased to announce version 0.10 of bitcoinj, a Java library for
writing Bitcoin applications. BitcoinJ has been used to create everything
from end-user wallet apps to network crawlers to SatoshiDice.

To learn how to obtain bitcoinj 0.10, please see the following page:

   https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/wiki/UsingMaven

The v0.10 release is signed by Andreas Schildbach's GPG key. The git hash
of the release is 777e6781d789. This paragraph is signed by the same
Bitcoin key as with previous releases (check their release announcements to
establish continuity).

Signature: H9Nl7FPnmrUOmjhUZ0+xB4YW3q5F5gIkGdvllsDWmWYvOkNQHAE9jZE0I/qE1VfLPeMV+Rzo7geTB43uDSFSMek=

*New in this release*

   - An implementation of *micropayment channels* was added. There have
   been many bugfixes and improvements since the first announcement. This
   feature allows you to set up a 1:1 payment relationship with a remote
   server and after a short setup process send very tiny payments, very
   rapidly. It's suitable for metered billing applications. An article,
   "Working with micropayments" explains how to use it. This work was a joint
   effort between Matt and myself.
   - A simple sublibrary has been added that provides async IO based
   client/server classes that transmit length prefixed protocol buffers.
   - Thanks to Matija Mazi, some classes have been added that implement *the
   BIP 32 deterministic wallet algorithm*. Note that these classes are not
   yet used elsewhere in the system and full deterministic wallet support is
   therefore not available, however, a low level API is available for
   experimentation. That API is very likely to change in future releases so
   don't get too attached to it.
   - Thanks to Gary Rowe, we have integrated *a new Maven plugin* that
   checks the SHA1 hashes of downloaded dependencies against a hard-coded
   list. This means that even if an upstream Maven repository or developer
   were to be compromised, library dependencies could not be switched out for
   corrupted versions without someone noticing. For 0.10 the dependency hashes
   were just initialised based on what was already downloaded. In future,
   reproducible builds of upstream dependencies and auditing of changes would
   provide better security. You can and should use Gary's
plugin<https://github.com/gary-rowe/BitcoinjEnforcerRules> in
   your own projects to defend against a possible compromise of the bitcoinj
   repository.
   - *Callback handling* has been much improved. Each event listener can
   have an Executor specified which takes responsibility for running the
   callback. If you don't specify one they run by default on a single
   background thread, the "user thread", instead of the origin framework
   threads. This means your callbacks no longer need to be thread safe as
   they're always run serially. You can also change the default executor if
   you would like to control the thread on which callbacks run, for example to
   marshal them into your GUI toolkit thread automatically. This fixes some of
   the most painful parts of the pre-0.10 API, for instance that transaction
   confidence listeners were not allowed to re-enter the library.
   - *Exception handling* has also improved. You can assign a global
   Thread.UncaughtExceptionHandler which receives any exceptions thrown on
   the user thread (i.e. by your own event listeners), as well as any internal
   exceptions thrown by network threads (like inability to parse a message
   sent by a remote peer). Because your listeners now run on a separate thread
   by default, you can no longer accidentally cause internal data corruption
   or prevent other callbacks from running by leaking exceptions out of your
   callbacks; a subtle knife-edge in the previous API.
   - Support for *automatic wallet key rotation* has been added.
   - We now require Bloom-capable (0.8+) peers by default and will
   disconnect from older nodes. This avoids accidental bandwidth saturation on
   mobile devices.
   - The wallet now accepts timelocked transactions if it created them
   itself.
   - The wallet can be told to empty itself out, in which case the fee will
   be subtracted from the total amount instead of added. This simplifies the
   common case of wanting to send your entire balance whilst still including a
   fee.
   - Some JNI peers for event listeners were added. Auto-generated JNI
   bindings are experimental and not yet merged in to the mainline codebase:
   for now they are available as part of a separate project on github. This
   work allows you to access the bitcoinj API using relatively natural looking
   C++ code and an embedded JVM.
   - You can now register custom PeerFilterProvider implementors to add
   things to Bloom filters that aren't necessarily in wallets.
   - We have begun adding nullity annotations to the API. Combined with a
   strong static analysis engine like FindBugs or the IntelliJ Inspector, you
   can find cases where you aren't handling possible null pointers. Note that
   you should configure your static analysis system to understand the Guava
   Preconditions assertions, as otherwise you will get false positives.
   - You can now control how much information Wallet toString() dumps
   contain more precisely. Extensions can contribute to a wallets debug dump
   as well, and transaction data is now optional.
   - Documentation: The getting started tutorial and PingService example
   were rewritten. New articles were added that cover optimising chain sync
   and using the library from non-Java languages. Existing articles were also
   extended and refreshed.
   - Many bug fixes and new methods. You should upgrade as soon as possible
   to get the bug fixes, in particular, one that could cause transactions
   inside the same block to be incorrectly re-ordered when using Bloom
   filtering (which can affect the wallet). The library code now has more
   internal annotations to help static analysis engines, and several bugs were
   fixed as a result of that.

*API Changes*

   - The ScriptBuilder class now takes TransactionSignature objects, these
   wrap a raw ECDSA signature and the SIGHASH flags together, with utility
   methods to work with them.
   - The Locks class has been renamed to Threading. The thread on which
   callbacks run has been changed, see above.
   - The WalletEventListener.onKeyAdded method became onKeysAdded and now
   takes a list, to make processing of bulk adds more efficient.
   - BitcoinURIParseException is now checked so you can't forget to handle
   bogus URIs.
   - The Wallet.toString(..) method has additional parameters now so you
   can control what is included in the dump.

*Known issues*
*
*
Please see the limitations and missing
features<https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/wiki/Limitations> page.
This page has been fleshed out since the last release with common issues
and missing features. A few issues were also fixed and removed.

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