NJN: Java News Client

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Contents News Overview Current version (0.02 and up) Details README Screenshots Download Version 0.01 Details README Screenshots Download News 2005-09-21 Wow, has it really been four years since my last update? I really should try and do better. Sorry... The glacial pace of development honestly doesn't mean I've abandoned NJN — I haven't, I've just been really busy with other projects (in particular, development work on eComStation). At any rate, I've finally updated the code. The big new feature: actually reading news is now possible! (Yes, finally.) The code is still woefully incomplete. For the moment, I am still limiting NJN to one active connection on one server. You can't select multiple articles at a time. You can't save or forward articles; nor can you reply, follow-up, or post in any way. Decoding of binaries is still not possible. There is no support for displaying non-Latin text. Threading and sorting of messages is not supported. There is no working configuration dialog (so you still have to edit the configuration file by hand). Finally, the group window most likely has a huge memory leak in it, since all articles are read into memory and then left there until the group is closed. Incidentally, I've updated the action icons (again). I decided that the previous ones tried to be way too fancy for their own good. Overview NJN (the Nehelenia Java newsreader) is (planning to be) a Usenet news client, implemented in Java. NJN is loosely modelled after the superb OS/2 newsreader, ProNews/2, but is considerably less complex. Currently, it has very limited functionality, and is really intended only for the extremely curious. (Or for prospective developers, but I'm not really ready to handle contributions just yet.) There are two versions here: the mostly abandoned version 0.01, and the current version 0.02. Although I've pretty much abandoned v0.01, I've made it available here because some people might want to play with it. It runs faster than v0.02, since it uses AWT instead of Swing. You can also get a bit of a feel for the program's history. Please note: Work on NJN proceeds very slowly (as in, one or two updates a year — if that). I'm doing this mostly for fun, and for self-education. I do hope, however, that NJN will one day be a more-or-less fully functional and stable news client. Version-specific information follows. Current version (0.02 and up) This is a major rewrite of the older version 0.01, which uses the Swing toolkit for the GUI instead of AWT. Requirements NJN is currently being developed using Java 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 under eComStation (OS/2). As far as I know, I'm not doing anything Java-2-specific; in theory, NJN should run under Java 1.1.8, so long as the Swing toolkit (1.0 or higher) is installed. Hardware requirements are whatever your Java runtime needs to be usable. I do recommend at least a Pentium 166 with 64 MB of RAM or more. Current functionality Connect to a news server (authentication is not supported, nor is SSL) Download a list of newsgroups Subscribe or unsubscribe groups by editing the NEWSRC file Non-persistently subscribe groups through the UI Set preferences by editing the configuration file Open a newsgroup and get a list of articles Retrieve and display a news article For more details, see the README file. Screenshots Main window Group window (These screenshots may not always reflect the exact appearance of the most recent build.) Download njn-002_20050921.zip (binaries and source included) Version 0.01 This is the older, AWT-based version of NJN. It's provided only for the terminally curious; I really don't recommend using it for reading news. It has some odd bugs I was never able to pin down (probably the fault of poor design). You cannot use it to post, mail, follow-up or forward messages. Nor can it save, decode, perform threading, filter, cache data locally, or even sort messages or groups. Requirements Requires Java 1.1, no additional toolkits required. Tested under OS/2 Warp with IBM JDK v1.1.8. Current functionality Connect to a news server Refresh the article counts for all listed newsgroups Subscribe or unsubscribe groups by editing NEWSRC Set preferences by editing the configuration file Open a newsgroup and get a list of articles Retrieve and display a news article You need a 'newsrc' file already, NJN v0.01 won't create one for you. Nor will it write any changes to it. See the README for more details. Screenshots Main window Group window Download njn-0_01.zip (binaries and source included).