Stellarium for Java / News: Recent posts

Since the beginning of the Stellarium for Java (S4J) project, running S4J required some Java development knowledge in order to checkout and build the project sources.

Since yesterday a first alpha release of Stellarium is available as downloadable application through the Java Web Start system. Feel free to try it out and give us feedback, from http://www.jfrog.org/confluence/display/S4J/Welcome+to+Stellarium4java

We are proud to announce that Stellarium for Java (S4J) has been selected as a Conference for JavaOne 2008 next May in San Francisco.

However, as participating to such a remote event has a non-negligible cost, we are not yet sure to be able to participate. Should you will to sponsorize our participation, just let us know !

We're pleased to announce that we setup an environment on http://jfrog.org ("where frogs can code") to better develop and maintain S4J. This will provide us JIRA, a Wiki, and faster Subversion and Web hosting. This improvement will not affect S4J on SourceForge that will be kept up to date.

Here it is ! After fixing some celestial bodies positions computation (thanks to Frederic), we finally got this smooth view of the sun through the atmosphere.

By the way, note that we upgraded to JOGL 1.1.0 and Java3D 1.5.1, which changed led to some computations changes, but to also provide new opportunities, such as the inclusion of Java2D displays, especially anti-aliased text, which is quite unique in the OpenGL word (aside text as 3D objects).

After a year of work, almost day for day, Stellarium for Java has now completed its migration of the original C++ code to Java. I would like to thank here Arnaud Barre and especially Frederic Simon, who was instrumental in achieving this critical step in the last weeks.

The software is still far from being operational, but it runs, at last. We are now starting a second step of complex debugging, in order to make the software work as expected. This will be as efficient as the development team uses different environments (Linux/Windows, connected telescope or not).

We welcome Frederic Simon on the project. Fred is a skilled software consultant, specialized in Java enterprise architecture. He is also an amateur astronomer, and has already worked on astronomy catalog software for its PhD.

Working on the project for a few weeks, Fred has already accomplished a very effective work in migrating C++ to Java code.

Thanks Fred for your contribution, and welcome again!

The latest revision of Stellarium for Java is now available on the SubVersion (SVN) repository. Subversion is a version control system more sophisticated than CVS that will specifically ease code refactoring.

Please note that the CVS repository is now deprecated, and will not host any other updates anymore. Always stay in sync with the SVN repository instead.