Nova is an IRC client that I worked on mostly during 1999 when I was a graduate student at Chalmers in Sweden. Nova is implemented in Java. The code in this repository is based on the last version, "1.5J2 alpha", which I uploaded to SourceForge in early 2000. The suffix "J2" refers to the use of the Java 2 SDK, which was new at the time. Java 2 JDK was the first Java development kit where the Swing GUI toolkit was included. In Java 2 there was no support for generics, however. One of the new changes I made to the old code was to add the missing types specializations to the collection class instances. All in all, I am very surprised how little work was needed to make Nova's old source code build with JDK 9 and fix all warnings. Well done, Java API overlords!
Nova uses the JavaHelp utility to display searchable help pages inside the app. The distributable jar file (jh.jar) for JavaHelp is included in the repository. Not just for convenience, also because JavaHelp is now obsolete. No surprise; a lot happened in the Java technology world since I stopped using Java as my main programming language. Sun Microsystems, the creator of Java, was acquired by Oracle and, after a period of decline as a language for front-end applications, Java had its big comeback as the official programming language for Android apps.
The original webpage at SourceForge.net is still online. Unfortunately, I lost the password for my old SourceForge account, and the associated email address has expired long ago, so there is no way of resetting the password. The page will remain as it was in the year 2000 until SourceForge finally removes it due to inactivity.
Here is the original release notice, in which I used my middle name:
Documentation is out of date. Sorry. Had no time to write something
properly. Just play around with the program. I'm sure you will discover
all of its features very quickly. Thanks for trying the alpha version.
Starter class: com.berk.nova.Nova
Run "java com.berk.nova.Nova" while being in the root Nova directory.
If you use JDK 1.1.x, don't forget to add the Swing GUI components to
your classpath. If you have a Java 2 SDK you should be fine with that
command.
Berk Oezer
http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~berk/
June 29, 1999 (two days before my summer vacation starts)
I changed the namespace of the Volta classes from com.berk to fish.robo, applying the reverse domain name convention to my actually existing domain "robo.fish". The website domain name "berk.com" never existed, or, if it existed, there was no relationship between me and the domain owners.
The copyrights for all items in this repository, except the JavaHelp bundle jh.jar, belong to Kai Berk Oezer. All items, except the JavaHelp bundle, are provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. Please follow the link below for details.
