Well, after spending three weeks in Canberra, I have now arrived in Ottawa, Canada. Now I have five hundred or so e-mails to read; if you tried to contact me within the last few weeks, please be patient - I will reply.

I am leaving New Zealand on the 29th June. I will be in Australia until the 20th July. During this time I will have e-mail access, however I will not be doing any jEdit development. On the 21st July, I am going to Canada. Once I settle in, I will resume jEdit development.

A jEdit icon pack, containing various icons in a variety of sizes and formats, is now available from the Icons and Images page. Thanks to Kris Kopicki for contributing this.

I have recently begun working on jEdit 4.1. You can see some early work in the CVS repository. Changes so far include improved printing, improved syntax highlighting, various user interface improvements, SOCKS proxy support (for people behind an MS proxy server), and more. You can find a full change log here.

(PS: John, maybe the icon for the 'Installation' topic should be made a little better? )

If you have this error try to rename XML.jar to aXML.jar. It solve it on my machine.

Slava says: indeed. The reason is that XML sets a couple of system properties in its plugin start() method, and if it happends to be loaded after SQL, then the SQL startup might fail. The author of this story says he is working on a patch and will send it to the SQL plugin maintainer over the weekend; so this is just a fix you can use in the meantime.

Plugins available for download outside PluginCentral:

• SpeedJava

Plugins with conversions completed in CVS:

• CodeAid

Plugins that have not yet been converted:

• HartMathPlugin
• JavaRefactor
• JStandard
• JSwat
• NetRexxJe

If plugin authors have any corrections or updates to this list, please post a comment to this article or send your information to John Gellene and this online list will be updated accordingly.

I have redesigned the jEdit web site, thanks to Ollie Rutherfurd who submitted a mockup! Tell me what you think of the new look.

Currently, it contains a mode that performs additional syntax highlighting for Ant build.xml files. If you have written a mode which you think others might find useful, but which cannot be included in the core, submit it here. Modes like this include extended Java modes that have a list of all classes, or HTML modes that include a list of all HTML tags.

We are in the process of upgrading the content management software used by jEdit Community to the latest version (0.702) of Post-Nuke. During this period, many of the features of the site may not be available. Thanks for your patience; we should have everything up and running again soon.

The Web Links area of jEdit Community is intended to provide visitors with links to resources that may be of specific benefit to users of jEdit, most of whom are working programmers and many of whom are Java programmers. We don't need links to the major commercial vendors (you know who they are), but if you have come across a resource that is especially helpful to you in your work, particularly if the resource is an Open Source package or application, please submit a link listing and share your discovery with the thousands of people who visit jEdit Community.

I hope you all have a happy new year's! Lets hope that 2002 is another great year for jEdit. I'm implementing soft wrap right now, and hope to release 4.0pre4, along with an updated XML plugin, in two weeks time or so.

I have created a PayPal account for accepting monetary donations to jEdit development. Note that this is entirely optional; jEdit is not, and will never become, shareware. You can use it as much as you want, guilt-free, without donating a single cent. Details here.

In an effort to fashion a useful project management framework for jEdit plugins, an initial draft of documentation of the JProjexx framework is being made available in the Downloads section. The documentation currently covers 17 classes and interfaces that lay out the basic building blocks of the framework and provide a few illustrative applications. At present only javadocs are being released as a discussion draft, but source code, executables and definitive documentation will eventually be released under an Open Source license.

The specs of the computer are:

• Pentium 4 1800 CPU
  
• 512 Mb SDRAM
  
• 40 Gb HD
  
• GeForce II MX 400 video card
  
• 19" monitor
  
• SB live sound card, with a nice set of speakers + subwoofer
  
• Microsoft optical mouse (only good product MS has ever made )
  
• No Windows XP! This saves 200 dollars.
  

As soon as the broadband link is in place, I will resume development of jEdit. Expect a 4.0pre3 very soon.

The changes are as follows:

• The EditBus plugin has been dissolved, and all classes have been moved to the ErrorList plugin. So you must remove any dependencies on "EditBusPlugin" from your plugin's property file.
  
• All ErrorSource API classes have been moved to the "errorlist" package; so you will need to add "import errorlist.*;" where necessary.
  
• To register an error source, you must now call:
  ErrorSource.registerErrorSource(errorSource);
  Instead of
  EditBus.addToBus(errorSource);
EditBus.addToNamedList(ErrorSource.ERROR_SOURCES_LIST,errorSource);

Some of the databases have been uploaded to the jEdit Community server, while others are available through download links posted by the person who compiled the database. Because the databases are not the conventional `type` of compiled binary, issues regarding licensing and distribution could be raised by the authors of the code base. We do not offer any view on whether those issues actually exist or how they might be resolved, but we have decided to take a conservative, practical approach to the uploading of CodeAid databases.

• We will accept for uploading CodeAid databases derived from software issued under an Open Source license.
• We will accept download links to other servers for CodeAid databases where the code base is subject a "community" `type` license or some other license that permits distribution of source code by parties other than the copyright holder.
• Ultimately It is the responsibility of the person mantaining the download link (and, of course, anyone downloading the database) to make sure that use of a database is permitted.

Notable changes from jEdit 3.2.2 include the new Buffer class (which is no longer derived from the Swing Document class) and changes in the Plugin API that will simplify the writing and maintenance of plugins.

The javadocs distribution will be updated with successive developement release of jEdit 4.0.

To register, you need only supply an email address for receipt of the newsletter. You may register more than once to send copies of the newsletter to multiple addresses. You can select whether to receive the newsletter in HTML or plain text format. You can also customize the contents of your own copy of the newsletter by specifying the `type`s and number of postings contained in your email.

This new feature is available only to registered members of jEdit Community. Registration at jEdit Community is free and also allows you to specify the display theme of the web site and leave messages for other members.

The jEdit Community web site now has a moderated, Interactive FAQ facility where you can post questions about installing and using jEdit and submit answers to your own questions or to questions submitted by others. This new feature, developed especially for jEdit Community, will allow users to help develop a question and answer base for a static FAQ document as well as for general reference. We hope you will take advantage of this new service and let us know any comments or suggestions you have about it.