Supported version of iJava

[Andrus Adamchik]

This is not a bug report, but a message for @SpencerPark and the iJava community. Myself, my colleagues and open source collaborators at DFLib.org are avid iJava users. I am using it for public DFLib presentations and everyday data work alike. So we are thankful to Spencer and other project contributors. 🙏

Even though the last release of iJava happened 5 years ago, it withstood the test of time and works fine with the modern versions of Java and Jupyter. But still various issues kept accumulating and needed to be addressed. I can see that some community members deal with those privately on their own forks. And I always wondered if we can somehow join efforts and work on things together? 🤔

So what we did towards that goal in DFLib is we went a step beyond a fork, and cloned the project to a new repo called JJava - https://github.com/dflib/jjava ("J" stands for both "Jupyter" and "the next letter after I" 😎). We fixed issues that bothered us the most (NoClassDefFoundError on transitive dependencies, and one of the few JShell-related memory leaks) and created a release that is a drop-in replacement of iJava 1.3.0 at https://github.com/dflib/jjava/releases .

More importantly, we are making a commitment to continue the development and support of the clone for the community. The support is sponsored by my company ObjectStyle. It is not unlimited (i.e. there are no full-time salaried employees assigned just to jjava ... yet), but will let the project stay current and continue to thrive. We have a great track record on that with Apache Cayenne, Bootique.io and other open source projects.

But back to the "joining effort" part... I was hoping we can collaborate with everyone who fixed bugs or implemented new features in iJava over the last 5 years to make the product shine. So this is an open invitation to anyone who cares about Java and Jupyter working together. Feel free to start discussion threads at https://github.com/dflib/jjava/discussions , bring PRs from your private forks, and otherwise share your thoughts on what you'd like to see in the Java kernel.

Thanks,
Andrus