Release is 1.3.b3 (beta 3). This release has 1 minor bug in the packet scanner that does not calculate properly ethernet FCS field when its present. Most frames do not contain FCS field and otherwise this field is benign.
Next release 1.3.b4 is being tested now by a community of test users. This community tests software directly out of the SVN or through private build distributions.
There are significant native memory management improvements to be released in beta 4. First beta 4 does away with Object.finalize() or more commonly used object finalization to cleanup native memory when various memory released jNetPcap objects go out of scope. Beta 4, uses Reference and ReferenceQueue mechanism to perform cleanup and general native memory management. This new technique is the one recommended by java language creators.
Several system properties are supported which provide control over memory management algorithms. These are nio.mx, nio.ms and nio.blocksize. The mx property sets a hard limit for amount of native memory that jNetPcap is allowed to allocate (similar to JVM -Xmx option) with a default of 64mb. The ms property sets a soft limit on native memory and block size sets the size in which memory is allocated when needed by jNetPcap library. The default ms and blocksize values are 64mb and 32kb respectively.
Licensing and javadocs have been cleaned up. All java source files now contain a file header which provides an accurate copyright notice and directs the reader to a LGPLv3 license. A copy of the license is provided with the distribution in files doc/COPYING and doc/COPYING.LESSER.
A number of performance improvements have also been made. Peering and deep copy of native memory between buffers and newly allocated memory has been streamlined.
We are in second phase of testing the beta 4 changes. We expect a public release of beta 4 to occur within next 2 weeks (by December 18th) at the latest.
