HL7 Comm 0.8.2 released
Update – 0.8.2 is now up, but the classpath.bsh example script isn’t working yet. I kind of got caught up with other things before I could figure out it.
I snuck out a 0.8.1 when it became obvious that there were some problems loading and saving beanshell scripts from the interactive beanshell editor. But in playing with the beanshell editor it became painfully clear that there were some serious usability issues with the editor, especially when a large file was being processed and it started hitting errors. To compensate the editor window now has another window to display the most recent error and to give you the option of continuing, continuing and ignoring subsequent errors, and, if errors are being ignore, to turn off ignoring errors (that is, resume pausing on errors). Error messages should now be simpler and make more sense as well. Hopefully this makes testing using the beanshell editor a lot less painful. Take a look at a screen capture here:
I’m also fixing some errors in the same beanshell scripts and adding another example (or two). A major feature I was planning for 0.9 was the ability to alter the classpath at runtime so your beanshell could call JDBC drivers or other things, like XMLRPC libraries, but after reading the documents (duh) it turns out that you can do this natively in beanshell. No work required. I’m adding a MySQL JDBC call to a sample script in this next version to demonstrate that.
I need to test this beanshell logic on a few more operating systems, then I’ll upload it here. 0.8 users should get the updates automatically. If I don’t get too worn out doing this I’m going to try for 0.9.8 of HL7 Browser tonight as well with some bugfixes.
Lastly – if you know a relatively easy way to provide syntax highlighting using a StyledEditorKit in Java I’d love to hear from you. Ideally there’s one supporting Java/beanshell already that I can plug in.