Thank you again LOTR!
As you needed sleep, I did find the solution through the wonderful world of Google.
I had to open a port through my firewall. Now I'm an Ultrapeer...and seem to have been the only one since. I am running VPN, and hope that does not cause anymore speed problems. More or less, things are DL faster, and UL are not affecting me so much.
With thanks, POR.

Check the sourceforge, everyone, WS 6.0 is now up (though not for all platforms yet). Please consider donating at https://igg.me/at/wireshare.

WireShare 6 for Windows now out!
 

It's been a long time, mostly because of "growing pains" as we graduated from Java 8 to Java 13 at one fell swoop... but WireShare 6 now has an installer and everything else. The icon was the result of a quick conversion as we worked hard to push this out to you all, but here's the result.


https://sourceforge.net/projects/wir...0.exe/download


This. Was. A. Trial. Between (I believe) Java 9 to Java 12, there was no intuitive way to package JAR files for distribution (which is why we released the JAR file in raw form, for early access people). For Linux distros that aren't Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, it's still a major pain.


If you want to donate---this project cost us quite a bit of money---the link is https://igg.me/at/wireshare

The project had not been costing anything. Why the sudden costs and why the sudden push to gain money?
SourceForge and Github should not be costing anything at all for a free open source project. I've opened projects without any setup or running costs.

Exactly what warrants the program to be pushed to version 6, a major release. What 'major' improvements have been made? What major improvements will people see in the program's performance? Did you fix all the bugs before considering making changes? (this is normally the logical thing to do.)
Do you know what are the bugs in the program? (I certainly know what several of them are.)

Cost who exactly? bigjx made no mention of costs and was surprised about you switching things around. You show up once or twice every year or three and want to make drastic changes without discussing things with the actual coder (sometimes breaking the program which bigjx has to fix.) You are not the coder. Anybody can open a project but that does not make them the king of all decisions particularly when they are not coders. That also does not fit with either a 'team' project or the spirit of the open source community.

Just curious. :)

Not sure why you feel you should be getting money out of the project. (Greed?)

This was not a bugfix release. The primary improvement was an update to Java 11+ compatibility. Previously it worked with Oracle Java 8 only, and was subject to its limitations; OpenJDK 8 didn't work either.




I'm not making a cent out of this. I decided to jump back into the WireShare project after a leave of absence for study purposes, and because it wasn't compatible with Java 11 or greater (latest test release is Java 14) I decided to hire people (yes, for money) to get this functionality coded in.


Because the improvements have already been made, I'm slightly above $500 out of pocket (coder asked for $20/hour, which was low end compared to some other bids). I want to recoup sunk costs, and possibly have money to continue hiring people to fix bugs. The biggest bug that I've seen, from extensive testing, is the "welcome window", which is coded in HTML and displayed with Mozilla XULRunner. This seems to rub Java the wrong way, so the HTML doesn't always display and it goes to fallback.


If BigJX is having issues with what I've done, I'm happy to speak with him and iron out some sort of roadmap so we're on the same page.

I guess it's the making of overriding decisions without discussing it with other members of the team. Did you ask the other members of the project if you should hire devs? Nobody asked you to hire the devs. Did you ask bigjx whether you should shift java versions? It appears to be up to your whims and that can be a little irritating, particularly when the most active members of the project are totally left in the dark.

The hiring of the devs was not a team decision, it was yours and your choice to be at a personal expense.

How do you define the word 'team'?

I understand where you are coming from and how you feel. I can't begin to understand how BigJX feels; I would not be happy if somebody wrested control of the team's direction from me, either.


That said, I believe this is one big misunderstanding, and I am fully prepared to accept some degree of fault for this. What happened was that I had need of WireShare for work reasons (I now run a software startup, so you can imagine WHY I needed it)... anyway, as soon as I opened it up, there was serious performance degradation on my (moderately old) computer, the kind you don't see with other Java apps. Linux support was nonexistent. It also refused to connect for half a day, notwithstanding my new GNUTELLA.NET file, firewall gone, whatever I did it took its sweet time.



I attempted to reach out to BigJX several times before pulling the Git logs, seeing that there hadn't been any changes checked in over a few months, concluding that he'd quit the team (my mistake), and then transitioning the codebase over to Bitbucket for testing (it'll be moved back to Github very soon).



That was when I did my research, found that Java 11 can offer serious performance improvements because a "vendored" version can be cut up in such a way that only the necessary parts of it are included, and hired the appropriate manpower.



I understand this is no way to run a team and I apologise to BigJX and everyone else involved. I am trying to fold WireShare into my organisation, simply so that we can share infrastructure; there's no question of this turning into a for-profit business, or anything like that, just trying to gain users and turn this into a full-time thing rather than a spare-time project.


I am happy to work with BigJX again if he'll forgive me for the way I've run the team. He and the community have my unqualified apologies.

I wonder where you'd be had bigjx and I not merged projects with the present one six years ago.
My understanding is bigjx tends to go through particularly busy periods at work and thus might be slow to respond at times.

I know one reason, a redundancy in the code approach. My own custom version is particularly fast to connect (as good as 2009) and reliable with no major drops during a session, a particular problem I had been witnessing over a few years regardless of program version.

Out of curiosity do you ever connect as an ultrapeer? Do you port forward or use UPnP?

After being away in the heavily fire affected region of my state for a month, upon returning found my programs were all firewalled and took me some time to figure it out. My partner's ipad had stolen my static network address. :D (My video card had died upon returning before eventually getting things back up.)

I do not recall receiving any messages either here or at SourceForge from you. As LOTR has said, I am somewhat slow at times to respond due to traveling and work and I do need to get better at acknowledging the receipt of messages.

Up until now the main contributors to the code have been LOTR and I. I am not a java coder nor do I have any formal training in any coding language. I am self-taught and learn as I go. The WSHR source is also very complex and massive as you well know and I for one welcome any help updating it and making it better. It was original written in Java 6 for 32bit machines and works well if you have 32bit Java installed. These days that is not always possible or practical especially with macOS. The reason why it uses the fallback browser for the home screen when you have 64bit java installed is because the embedded browser was MozSwing. MozSwing was 32bit and uses a customized 32bit version of XULrunner 2.0.

We have a Developers discussion board at SF where we, as the developers, can discuss the issues and direction of the project. Also, if you need a custom version for your own purposes you could have started a fork with your custom changes such as; icons, color scheme, and branding without changing those items in the master code.

BigJx

I am still using WireShare version 5.6.5 since version 5.6.6 had connection problems so I had to switch back to version 5.6.5. Has anyone tested version 6.0.0? Is it worth updating? I downloaded WireShare 6.0.0 (BigJx) but before updating I would like to read other users' impressions about this release. With version 5.6.5 I have had two major issues- I cannot find a way to disable update check on start-up and with forced Windows shut-down it loses its data and settings.