jrawio 1.5.0 released (and should be OSGi-ready)

jrawio is one of the projects I'm managing and delivers the capability of reading "camera raw" image formats with Java (technically, it's just a plugin of Java Image I/O, so it doesn't have a specific API). As far as I know it's the only FLOSS 100% Java library able to read everything in a "camera raw" file, from the raw bits to the metadata (ImageRo by Andrey Kusnetsov is another 100% Java library, which is free for non commercial applications but not FLOSS, and only reads embedded JPEGs in the camera raw files).

For the latest three years, if you wanted the latest release of jrawio you needed to checkout sources and compile them. After such a long time, I've finally managed in setting up a complete automated software factory for the project, based on Hudson, and yesterday I've been able to push an official release, 1.5.0, which is the first non-beta. The new software factory will enable me to make frequent releases (there is a number of requests to support new camera models that I'm implementing).

Maven users will love the fact that the project has been mavenized and is officially available now in the Java.Net Maven repository. Other users can download the artifacts from the Java.Net downloads page.

At the same time, the released artifacts *should* be OSGi compatible (in the sense that there is OSGi stuff in the manifest). The conditional is due to the fact that I haven't tested yet this feature (my friend Filippo Diotalevi gave me some pointers about OSGi testing, but I hadn't time to check them out). Since jrawio is used in many NetBeans Platform projects, I guess there should be no classloader related issues, but you know "if you didn't test it, it's broken". I'd be glad if somebody would like to give it a try in a OSGi environment and give me feedback (and possibly testing code ;-)

As part of the other fixes worth mentioning, Java 5 is now required (the project is tested with both Java 5 and 6), Minolta 7D (MRW format) has been added, ARW (Sony) and RAF (Fujifilm) formats have been added, support for other formats has been fixed, as well as a number of issues with specific test images. The complete change log is available here.

Please forgive me as the web site is not updated yet.