Release dates for previous jMonkeyEngine builds

tensei · October 14, 2011, 12:33pm

Hi!

First of all I’m new to jMonkey and this forum, but judging from this forum it seems that there is a great community surrounding this engine.

I have been searching around on the website and the forums, for a list of release dates for previous jMonkeyEngine builds. I could not find any however, and therefore I turn to you for some help, surely someone must know. The history entry on wikipedia offers some information regarding this, but I was hoping for some more detailed information. Especially on the 0.1 and up to 2.0 which seem to have been relased in a time period of five years. It would be great if someone has some information regarding this.

Cheers

normen · October 14, 2011, 1:56pm

Hm, I guess it would be best to search the jME2 development forum for release posts, I found one with quick search

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/development-discussion-jme2/forum/topic/jme-10-release-candidate-1/

I don’t know if the old team put out a comprehensive list like that… May I ask what you need this information for?

tensei · October 14, 2011, 5:04pm

Hmm, I cannot find the jME2 forum in the forums list. I have however been able to conjure a somewhat complete list of release dates for various builds searching through the forum.

I need this information as part of my master thesis; where Im doing an evaluation of various scene graph API’s for Java. As part of this I’m looking at how frequently new builds are released. While one might argue that the releases previous to the forking to Ardor3D shouldnt be considered, I would like to atleast have a complete list.

Here is al ist of what I have been able to gather so far, I’ve used the forum post date as a base for calculating the date backwards. There might be errors in my calculation, so feel free to look over them!

Do anyone have anything specific on the 2.0 release? Was there any releases between 1.0 and 2.0? Also some of the forum posts I have found havent been specific to if its a release or not, I've marked those with a note. It would be great if anyone with more knowledge would contribute.

wezrule · October 14, 2011, 5:29pm

oh nice :), if you hover over “forums” there’s “legacy jme2” at the bottom. You should also do an interview with a core member and quote that in as well for extra credit

sbook · October 14, 2011, 10:24pm

You might also try searching through the repository’s commit messages. I believe Josh and Mark were pretty good about tagging the announced releases (which would’ve gotten a revision number)…

This sounds like a great paper, any chance we’ll be able to get a look at it once its defended and published?

erlend_sh · October 14, 2011, 11:12pm

tensei said:Do anyone have anything specific on the 2.0 release? Was there any releases between 1.0 and 2.0?

The jump to 2.0 didn't really represent a major rewrite the way 3.0 did. Other developers are free to correct me, but I'd call jME 2.0 a more stable, polished version of 1.0. Thing is, 2.0 never really went officially stable under the old core team. When we announced the release of 2.0.1, as I recall it, that was the first officially stable release of the 2.0-line. We added the .1 because 2.0 was pretty widely used in production already, so we wanted to emphasize the fact that this was just a continuation of the 2.0 they were already using with the latest contributions & fixes added.

This sounds like an interesting thesis indeed. Will you go into "what is a beta/alpha/RC", and how greatly that can differ from project to project? For instance, the industry standard for 'Alpha' is "feature complete". And, although jME3 was feature complete since its first alpha in the sense that it was usable, there's been countless API changes and feature additions in every alpha since. We've done a pretty good job respecting the feature freeze for alpha4-beta1.

Also, you speak of builds. I'm curious how you read into that. How do nightly builds & platform updates play in to that?

tensei · October 19, 2011, 7:15am

I’ll definetely go over the commit messages in the repository, hopefully in the next couple of days.

In the thesis I will look into the frequency of releasing new builds for the various APIs in order to create a picture as to how it is maintained and being actively developed. I have not decided yet whether or not to factor nightly builds into this. What will perhaps be of most interest would be to look over the repository logs and see if there have been a constant steady development, or perhaps there are large gaps between commits for example. Feel free to come with suggestions!

In regards to how beta/alpha/rc differ from project to project, I think for example in the case of the alpha’s for jME3 it would be something to take notice of, but I dont think that the thesis will go into depth as to discussing what the industry standards are and such. The frequency of releasing builds will not be the sole focus point for the evaluation, but rather one of several points.

erlend_sh · October 19, 2011, 6:49pm

tensei said:
What will perhaps be of most interest would be to look over the repository logs and see if there have been a constant steady development, or perhaps there are large gaps between commits for example. Feel free to come with suggestions!

Yep, I think repository logs will be able to tell you considerably more about our constant development and community contributions than any tagged & released build will.

tensei said:
The frequency of releasing builds will not be the sole focus point for the evaluation, but rather one of several points.

Sounds good! Do stay in touch, this sounds like a cool project.