Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Maintenance update Go Bible Creator 2.4.1

We recently encountered a very old bug in Go Bible Creator, or rather in Sun Java (now Oracle).

The internal manifest has a line break inserted at column 72 for long Info: lines.

Amazingly, the original method counted bytes rather than Unicode characters. This meant that long lines that contained multibyte characters could end up with the codepoint being split at the line breaks, thus rendering the compiled JAR file invalid, and for many phones caused the application unable to be installed.

The bug was never triggered for either short Info: lines, or even for long lines in which all the characters were single byte codepoints, as is the case for the English alphabet. This is why it has taken since 2003 for this bug to surface.

Our programmer found an open-source alternative method to make the manifest. He has implemented this in the maintenance update that is now available as Go Bible Creator version 2.4.1 which can be downloaded from the usual places.

This has been checked by the team who encountered the problem, and they have reported that the updated build now installs OK on all their phone models.