Download Data Crow 4.3

Data Crow is a catalog program that can bring order to the chaos of just about any collection, whether it’s books, CDs, DVDs, photos, or media files. Where possible, all kinds of relevant and additional information is obtained from the internet. The program is open source and written in Java, so it is easy to make changes to its appearance or functionality. After a long time of silence, there is a new website and in the form of Robert Jan van der Waals a new person is in charge. He has released version 4.3 and it is accompanied by the following notes and comments:

Data Crow version 4.3

This version is a first after many years. Data Crow is Java-based application and it has moved on since 2019. With this release I have updated all 3rd party libraries to their latest available version (where possible). The code itself has been first tested against Java 18 (latest version at the moment). The release itself however has been made compatible with Java 11.

Is there anything new in this release? Not really, it’s more of a maintenance release. The next version will focus on the online services. You really should upgrade though, the old version is no longer deemed safe. The 3rd party libraries are potentially even a danger to you system; some will have heard about the Log4J problems where systems were exposed. This has been fixed by now in Log4J2, which is now also used by Data Crow. I have removed things that were already not working and required a complete rewrite. These are the things I will focus on in upcoming releases.

Now onto the positive; everything in this release is working. I have improved the ease of use for Windows users by packaging the Java version in the release, that’s for both the installer as well as for the application itself. The installer also no longer has an issue installing to the Program Files folder, which the old version couldn’t.

The server has had its web component removed as it is far too outdated by now. The application server functionality has been left in and has been greatly improved; it’s much faster now.

New requirements

• Java Second Edition version 11 (64 bit) or higher.

Fixed

• Java 18 incompatibility issues have been fixed.
• Backup and Restore has been fixed. It now uses Java standard functionality to create and restore backups.
• Server to client communication has been fixed. The old implementation has been removed and server to client communication has been replaced with a Gson-backed functionality. The old code used a now obsolete library. Gson is well maintained and it allowed me to pick and select if and how items, pictures, etc are communicated between the client and the server. This also means that the speed has been improved significantly.
• Image server is back up again (old implementation was not compatible with the new Java version)
• Various small compatibility issues have been fixed.
• eBook import has been fixed.

Changed / Updated

• Java version support has been changed from Java v1.7 to Java Second Edition v18 (!)
• Upgraded Log4J to the latest version. The old library was a huge security risk and had to be replaced.
• Build process has been moved to Maven (thanks to: flag-courier).
• Code has been moved from net.datacrow to org.datacrow.
• Java Help was upgraded to 2.05
• jAudiotagger was upgraded to 2.2.5
• Matroska File parser has been upgraded to 2.3.1
• MP4 Parser has been upgraded to 1.9.41.2 (patch 2)
• Bouncycastle has been upgraded to 1.7
• Jacksum has been upgraded to 3.1
• JTattoo has been upgraded to 1.6.13
• TheMovieDB API has been upgraded to 4.3
• Cobra HTML parser has been replaced by jSoup
• Jasper Reports has been upgraded to 6.20
• HSQL DB has been upgraded to 2.7.0
• JSON-IO library has been dropped (too old)
• Tomcat Embedded has been dropped and has been replaced with the latest version of Jetty. Jetty is solely used as a web service for the hosting of images when making use of the Data Crow server edition.
• Libraries not mentioned have been dropped and replaced.
• Code optimizations to bring Data Crow’s code in line with the latest version of Java.
• Tika has been upgraded to version 2.4.1.
• PDFBox has been upgraded to 2.0.26. There is a version 3 release candidate which I wanted to adopt but it’s not compatible with Tika 2.4.1.
• Added better ISBN / EAN management and incorporated this into the e-book file import and various other places.
• Image type support has been improved and now allows for the following file types to be imported / used as picture: bmp, tf8, pic, rgbe, tif, ico, sgi, ham8, ham, wbmp, pam, pict, jbig2, ilbm, tpic, png, raw, JBIG2, pfm, lbm, pbm, psb, rgb8, emf, psd, cur, deep, tiff, pntg, gif, btiff, mac, tga, wmf, xyze, btf, pgm, dcx, jpeg, pct, jpg, pcx, svg, iff, rle, ppm, icns, hdr, jb2, JB2, db
• Apache Batik has been upgraded to version 1.14
• Added TwelveMonkeys ImageIO libraries for easier support of other image types

Removed

• The web module has been dropped for now. It would need to be completely rebuild to run successfully on the latest version of Java. This will be rebuild at a later stage.
• The following online services have been removed; Amazon.com (is now a paid for service only, not a fan of Amazon), Imdb.com (paid for service), Musicbrainz (no longer active), discogs.com (requested for a new API key) , ISBN db (now a paid for service), moviemeter (needs to be investigated, was already not working in the old version back in 2019), the games db (will be replaced with MobyGames).