Software update: JAlbum 5.2

Anyone who has ever tried to make a collection of images and photos available via HTML knows that keeping and displaying this collection in an orderly manner is a tedious and time-consuming task. There are programs available that will do this job for you and JAlbum is one of them. The big advantage of this program is that you can work with your own templates, HTML and CSS files, so that you can easily give it your own appearance. Recently, version 5.2 has been shown on the website with the following changelog:

Changes:

• Updates to large albums now significantly faster as JAlbum can skip subdirectories that haven’t been touched since the last album build
• Memory handling improved: Variables not specific to an individual image are shared among images (previously copies were kept). The new memory handling is both a memory saver and a speed-up
• Skin template files are now processed faster due to rewritten way of expanding $variables. Expect between 30% and 100% speed increase depending on skin due to these two changes
• Skin developers that want to accelerate skins that rely heavily on scripting may compile the scripts into Java classes. In order to minimize changes to the existing code, one may subclass the new CompiledScript convenience class that provides direct access to most of the neccesary JAlbum variables
• Skin specific user interface controls are no longer synchronized with user defined variables in order not to bloat the user variable list with settings that can as well be set in the skin specific user interface. Skin writers: You may now prefix skin hints that apply to your UI controls with “skin.” instead of “user.” in order not to bloat the user variables list
• New “JSP 2.0 style” syntax for inserting simple expressions. Expressions like can now be written as $[meta.Flash]† In the future, this syntax may also be accelerated further compared to standard scriptlet syntax
• Comments that are not to show in generated code can now be written using
• Improved error reporting for scripting errors. A full stack trace is now presented if errors occur in Java code called from scripts
• Made date interpretation more robust: The variables fileDate and originalDate are no longer String types but FormattedDate types. This will require a slight modification to skins that assume the String type like older BluPlusPlus skins
• Scripts may now call window.ui2Engine() to synchronize the JAlbum engine with the user interface
• Korean translation added. Thank you Jae Sung Jung
• Norwegian translation added. Thank you Stein Kristiansen
• Ukrainian translation added. Thank you Serhij Dubyk Updated French, Polish, German, Hungarian and Slovak translations. Thank you translators!
• Made JAlbum recognize “mp4” files as media files too
• Again recognizes EXIF ​​2.2 tags (Thanks to Klaus A. Brunner, Austria)
• Updated UI synchronization classes (BeanBinder and PropertyBinder) to properly synchronize user interfaces that are implemented using class hierarchies
• Added the “not” attribute as a convenience to the ja:if tag
• Added missing progress info text for index page processing (used to just read “Processing image metadata”)
• Searches skin specific texts in the “texts” directory of a skin prior to searching in the root skin directory (was previously the other way around)
• Added a “currentFile” variable to indicate the currently processed file. (Gives more clear code than writing files[imageNum-1] †
• Bundled the popular “Simple” skin.
• Updated bundled skin BluPlusPlus to v3.1. There are too many enhancements to list here. Just have a peek at the BluPlusPlus frame gallery and you’ll see one of them
• Updated bundled skin ExhibitPlus. to v1.4. A lot of enhancements here too
• Defaults to using Firefox as browser on Linux instead of Netscape

Bug fixes:

• EXIF comments encoded in Unicode sometimes lost their last character
• The skin specific plugins folder wasn’t taken into account when executing the onload.bsh script
• Code loaded from plugins directories would only find local classes and classes loaded by the system class loader. This would cause trouble running JAlbum in environments with custom class loaders (like web servers for instance)
• Didn’t recognize .jpe as a valid JPEG file extension.
• The getModifiedSize() method of image filters that implement the ModifiesSize interface wasn’t passed the full range of context variables (as compared to the filter() method
• The sharpen and blur filters could produce borders around images
• Calling processTemplateFile(source, dest) from init.bsh wouldn’t expand the currently defined variables
• Skin specific fields weren’t saved to a project if they were disabled.
• Relative paths to original files weren’t constructed correctly if the image directory path started like the output path without being a subdirectory thereof. (For instence the image directory being “C:album original” and the output directory being “C:album”)
• Loading a project containing skin specific drop list settings that no longer exist in a drop list could cause NullPointerException
• JAlbum didn’t respect custom drop list settings to be loaded from a project (say for instance a thumbnail size of “88×88”)
• The totalImages variable wasn’t available on index pages
• The Family skin sometimes created broken links between folders
• The Experience skin sometimes had problems interpreting dates
• The PropertyBinder class could go in an infinite loop if passed certain component structures.
• PropertyBinder.syncUI() didn’t recursively process fields of type JComponentHolder (for instance ControlPanel)