[ANN] Release 9.0.0 DP-6

[panagiotis merakos]

Dear list members,

We are pleased to announce the release of LiveCode 9.0.0 DP-6.


Developer Preview Release
=========================
Warning: this is not a stable release.  Please ensure that you back up your
stacks before testing them.

Getting the Release
===================
You can get the release at https://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/ or via
the automatic updater.

Release Contents
================
LiveCode 9.0.0 DP-6 is the first preview containing the Java Foreign
Function Interface (FFI).

Foreign handlers can be written in LiveCode Builder which bind to calls on
Java classes via the Java Native Interface (JNI). In particular this
enables binding to classes in the Android API. Details and examples of this
feature can be found in the release notes and the Dictionary (under
com.livecode.java), or directly in the implementation of the Java LCB
support library in our GitHub repository:
https://github.com/livecode/livecode/blob/develop/libscript/src/java.lcb

This release also contains a command-line tool called lc-compile-ffi-java
which will autogenerate LCB wrappers of Java classes, given the appropriate
data. The specification for the data used to generate these wrappers is
available in our GitHub repository:
https://github.com/livecode/livecode/blob/develop/docs/specs/java-ffi-dsl.md

This release will be followed shortly by a blog post with some worked
examples of these features.

Known issues
================
Linux standalones that include a browser widget will fail to launch. See
bug http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19396 for more details and
a workaround.

HTML5 standalones built using this release are not functional. See bug
http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19399 for more details.

The full release notes are available from:

http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/9_0_0/LiveCodeNotes-9_0_0_dp_6.pdf

Feedback
========

The Java FFI implementation required significant improvements to library
loading; these could be disruptive to externals, especially in standalones.
We suggest testing standalone builds in particular, so that we can iron out
any issues with this.

Please report any bugs encountered on our BugZilla at
http://quality.livecode.com/

We have a forum available for discussing LiveCode Builder at
http://forums.livecode.com/viewforum.php?f=93

Have fun!

The LiveCode Team
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