JAlbum Update Speeds FTP Transfers
By
Mike Pasini, The Imaging Resource
(Friday, December 16, 2005 - 11:53 EST)
The free Web album tool adds interface improvements and bug fixes to the latest release for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems with Java VM.
JAlbum, an easy-to-use, cross-platform Web photo album generator, has been updated with a new FTP engine, multiple processor support, improved text field handling and other interface improvements, as well as a few bug fixes.
Written in Java, the free JAlbum runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and has been translated into 28 languages. It provides both full control of album design as well as a large collection of ready-to-use skins. JAlbum resizes images to make index pages and slide shows before uploading the album to your Web site.
Changes
- Makes use of multiple processors in order to enhance album generation speed. On a dual core system the speed gain is close to 100 percent. On CPUs with hyperthreading, the gain is up to 60 percent.
- JAlbum can now automatically pick thumbnail images to represent folders instead of the folder icon being used as default.
- The old FTP component has been replaced with the much improved edtFTPj component. This results in better, faster and more compatible FTP support that hopefully doesn't suffer from the timeout problems that affected the old FTP component (FtpBean).
- The progress reporting while uploading large files has been improved.
- The jsch library for the SFTP support has been updated from v0.1.21 to v0.1.24.
- All user interface text fields now have undo/redo capability and a popup menu with clipboard functionality (previously one had to use keyboard shortcuts).
- The JPEG quality field is now a slider.
- New iterator element for skin designers: ja:fileiterator acts like a ja:coliterator nested within a ja:rowiterator but with the addition of two optional attributes: "dirs" and "nodirs" which includes only directories or plain files.
- JAlbum now ignores copying the dreadful hidden and write protected file "Thumbs.db" on Windows XP systems.
- Chameleon skin updated.
- Serbian and Croatian languages added.
- Polish, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Danish, Slovak, Czech and Chinese translations updated.
Bug fixes
- Fixed issue with slow uploads to certain ftp servers under Java 1.5. This is caused by a bug in Java 1.5 that causes unneccesary reverse DNS lookups to occur.
- If running out of memory while rendering thumbnail images for the Edit section, the thumbnail renderer would stop. Now it retries.
- The "Experience" skin wouldn't generate correct text under index page thumbnails with JAlbum v6.0.
- The "Simple" skin wouldn't generate pages if a directory only contained subdirectories.
- Images with incorrect EXIF dates (00:00:00) would cause the edit section to fail (NullPointerException).
- Fixed old navigation button bug in Colorful skin (index page navigation buttons showing even if only one index page).
- Fixed small Danish translation error.
- Fixed small issue with Experience skin (null pointer exception).
Visit the JAlbum site for more information or to download the lastest version.
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