Development Status — level of implementation of the PDF Specification
Development Roadmap — release planning
Versioning — how PDF Clown’s releases are defined
Resources — learn more about PDF Clown
Code Repository
If you liked to keep yourself up-to-date about the current development of PDF Clown, or to create patches for contributing bug fixes and new implementations to PDF Clown, the Subversion (SVN) repository is available on SourceForge.net.
Environments
PDF Clown runs on the following environments (you are free to adopt equivalent implementations if preferred):
- Java™: Java SE JDK 6 and above
- .NET: Mono Project 2.10.8 (.NET 4.0) and above or Microsoft .NET Framework
Versioning
PDF Clown is a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) whose conventions don’t obey to marketing allurement strategies: despite its rich set of features already available, you don’t have to expect its versioning to wildly soar to high numbers!
The version numbering scheme of PDF Clown’s releases consists of four numbers ({ A ‘.’ B ‘.’ C { ‘.’ D}? }, e.g. 0.0.1 or 0.0.3.2):
- the A number denotes the major version: it is changed only when major conceptual changes occur;
- the B number denotes the major revision: it is changed when relevant new features are introduced to implement a scheduled step of the Development Roadmap;
- the C number denotes the minor revision: it is changed when new features (and possibly bugfixes) are introduced to incrementally implement portions of the same major revision;
- the D number denotes a bugfix-only release that addresses relevant faults which require immediate fixing.
A release cycle is planned by a Development Roadmap step, denoted by a major revision and composed by two stages:
- the development stage (corresponding to the Development distribution);
- the release stage (corresponding to the Stable distribution).
A release cycle produces distributions mapping to the above-mentioned stages and corresponding to distinct packages within the SourceForge.net’s File Release System:
- the Stable distribution (PDFClown-stable package): this is the production release of PDF Clown featuring consolidated functionalities;
- the Development distribution (PDFClown-devel package): this is the unstable release of PDF Clown featuring the latest improvements, without warranties that its structure will be preserved through the next releases. Note that “unstable” refers to the evolutionary status of the API (which may change in the future to accomodate new enhancements), NOT to the inherent unreliability of the code (which, on the contrary, is carefully tested before every unstable release!)
Releases occurring during the development stage are suffixed by conventional pre-release terms (“PreAlpha”, “Alpha”, “Beta”, “RC” = Release Candidate), while consolidated releases are suffixed by the term “Stable”.
PDF Clown 