Each call to AttachCurrentThread results in a new Java thread object being
created. This is inefficient and also causes debugging issues with Eclipse
due to constant creation and removal of threads. Now AttachCurrentThread is
only called once for (all) listeners and once for logging (if used).
This enables listeners to be notified of not only value updates, but also flag
changes and deletions by using a bitmask to specify what notifications are
desired. The old API (which only provided a new/not new) flag is still
supported. This also subsumes the feature to listen to local changes (that's
one of the bitmask options).
The default behavior is to only notify remote changes, but for some
applications (e.g. GUI's) it's advantageous to know about local
changes as well.
This is (slightly) optimized in that local changes only result in
additional resources being consumed if (any) local listeners have been
created.
The JVM doesn't always do a good job of telling JNI modules that the JVM
is going away, which results in a crash in the JavaGlobal and/or
JavaWeakGlobal destructors as they try to delete the associated references
after the JVM has already gone away.
To protect against this, the Notifier now has a static variable that's set
when the Notifier instance (a singleton) is destroyed. This is used by
JavaGlobal and JavaWeakGlobal to detect when a process exit is in process.
The JNI bindings are built directly into the shared library. In the gradle
build, all built shared libraries are embedded into the generated jar.
Java bindings may be disabled via -DWITHOUT_JAVA (cmake) or -PskipJava=true
(gradle).
TODO:
- getEntryInfo() and RPC are not yet implemented.
- The cmake build doesn't integrate the built objects into the jar.
- The Java client and server tests are not built (but have been manually
tested).
This has not yet been tested on Windows.