jModNews Usenet News Reader

Introduction

Not much here yet... look at this screenshot

Or look at the registration description:

jModNews should become a "modular" Java Swing newsreader for
offline reading of text groups. It will use the McKoi database engine
(by default; maybe other options will be added later). I'll test it
with Sun's JVM on Windows (2k) and Linux, but since it is Java it
should work on other platforms as well. (Since it uses lots of Java
1.4 features, running it with a free JVM might be quite impossible at
the moment).

Main point why I am writing this is that there is no real good open
source offline news reader available as far as I know. Offline means
for me, that every action (except "pull new news") is possible without
having an online connection - (most readers have problems to queue
stuff like "subscribe new group" or "fetch more articles" to the next
online batch but want to perform these immediately) while still using
as less as possible bandwidth in the "pull" phase (i.e. don't download
articles the user has set to "mark read autmatically" etc. Good
exceptions from this (like Forte's Agent) are shareware - and not
extensible enough in my eyes.

Speaking of extensibility - it should be possible to code complex
scoring or navigation rules (which save the user's time) or display
plugins and distribute them without redistributing the whole
application; so jModularNews will get a nice plugin interface. Maybe a
scripting language (like BeanShell) will be added as well to allow
people without a java sdk environment to add scripts.

The largest technical problem i saw while developing a prototype of it
are Usenet protocols (Article Format, NNTP) which have long RFCs but
still lots of exceptions of that rules in real world. It would be
helpful if people using different news servers and reading different
groups tested this software and helping to iron the "bugs" out. But of
course, if no one wants to help me, I'll do the fixing on my
own...

Since that description was too short for registering the project, you can find some information in sf.net trackers.

Download

jModNews requires a Java Runtime Environment (Standard Edition, 1.4 or higher). If you do not have it yet, download it for free from java.sun.com.

it requires as well the mckoidb.jar in its extlib folder. You can find both this file and alpha versions in the snapshots area.

Sourceforge project page

CVS

You can also get the latest "bleeding edge" source code from CVS.

Browse it or use the following commands to check it out anonymously:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@jmodnews.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/jmodnews login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@jmodnews.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/jmodnews co jmodnews

Have fun!