Release 0.2- Implementing new feature in open source project Thaw

October 29, 2020

I have implemented a new feature in an open source project called Thaw.

Thaw is a tool to create documents with export to PDF in a text-concentrated working style. It offers a feature-rich and easy to learn markup language that you can write your documents in a human-readable way.

The maintainer of the project wanted to implement this feature which will expose a sub-command to clear the cache.

After doing some research on the project I found that there is a class called CacheUtil which deals with the caching activities. So, a good solution would be to add a function in this class to clean the cache directory. So, I added the following function-

I have used the FileUtils class of Apache Commons IO library.

Now, I needed to add a sub-command clean in the command line options. Thaw used picocli for building the command line interface. I added the following function to implement the sub-command-

In addition to the changes in the code, I also updated the THIRDPARTYNOTICE to include the attribution for Commons IO library.

After I am done with my changes I committed the change and opened a pull request.

Thaw Commit Message

There were couple of things that I worked with for the first time in the project. Thaw used Gradle as build tool. I used gradle for the first time. The project was organized using Java Platform Module System(JPMS). I have also used Jabba as Java version manager.