Monday, June 14, 2010

Guava release 05!

Guava release 05!

Hello guavateers,

I'm happy to (finally) inform you that Guava release 05 was quietly posted two weeks ago! It is also in the central maven repository as com.google.guava:guava:r05 (as will all future releases, so you may stop asking :-)).

Here is a report of the changes between r04 and r05. For that matter, here are the changes from r03 to r04 as well. There have been a few very nice new additions, as I hope you'll agree -- including the humble beginnings of a brand new package, com.google.common.net.

Remember that most newly-added classes and methods are marked @Beta, and so are still subject to change at any time. Note: this is particularly true of the cool new InternetDomainName class, several methods of which I already need to rename soon (sorry).

About the "Google Collections Library":

Everyone! It's time to stop using the library called the "Google Collections Library"! Guava represents a fully-compatible proper superset of that library. It also contains six months worth ofimportant bug fixes and improvements to performance and documentation.

Continuing to use the Google Collections may lead to trouble when an application ends up with both that and Guava on the classpath at the same time. If this happens, and Guava comes later in the classpath, unpredictable breakages could result! (And if Guava comes earlier, then the google-collect JAR will never even be seen; either way, the situation is senseless.)

Tools like Maven seek to manage your dependencies in an intelligent way, but cannot tell that Guava represents a newer version of Google Collections, so as long as the latter is still in use, it won't know the right thing to do with it.

Yes, the Guava JAR file is about 60% larger than the Google Collections one, but if this is an issue for you, we strongly recommend you address this using a JAR shrinking tool such as the much-loved ProGuard, and please share your experiences in doing so with the rest of us on this list.

Publicity?

With this release, I now see Guava as truly ready to be evangelized to the corners of the globe. Would you be able to help us spread the word? Blogs, comments, twitter, podcasts, company discussion forums, skywriting, whatever you please. It's especially important to me that we convey the message that Guava is the new Google Collections, and no one should use google-collect-1.0.jar anymore.

Any questions?

Thanks everyone!