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OSJava JarDiff released

February 13th, 2006 by Hen

Antony Riley just released JarDiff, a tool for creating diffs between jar files, over at OSJava.

The history is that I was complaining about the slowness of the javap/shell script I was using for multidoc-jnr on our IRC channel (irc.codehaus.org#osjava; thanks Bob!) and Antony started asking questions. I had given Clirr a shot, but the need for dependencies to be available was causing me trouble (due to its dependence on BCEL), so he went ahead and created JarDiff, a tool that sits on top of ASM.

Here’s an example diff page from within multidoc-jnr: gj-core 3.1->3.0 diff. I like it, and it’s got the speed I need to throw it at the Jakarta Commons stuff again.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “OSJava JarDiff released”

  1. eu Says:
    February 13th, 2006 at 10:55 pm

    Anither candidate for ASM users. BTW, it would be cool to compare method bodies and mark those with changed implementation…

  2. Antony Riley Says:
    February 14th, 2006 at 6:57 am

    The main problem with comparing method bodies is that different compilers generate different bytecode, we’ve already had one issue where a java compiler failed to mark some generated methods as synthetic giving bogus differences.