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Refas started out as a small project to manage references used by my partner while she did her PhD. We soon realized that the problem she was having managing references was more wide spread than that and software to assist with this problem was either hard to use or expensive (or in some cases both).

The project has grown a little since its small beginnings and eaten up huge chunks of my free time (can some one please remind me what the sun looks like). I think it has however now become a project worthy of a full release to the general public. Ironically the person I began writing it for has now finished her PhD with out ever getting to use it. Not all is lost as she is now moving on to a Post Doctoral position so it should still be useful.

By profession I am a software developer (well I like to think of my self as one ;-) and I enjoy writing software as do many others. I am greatly indebted to those developers who produce the open source software that this product relies upon and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work. At this time I am not releasing the source code for Refas but I am intending to in the future (we all have to eat).

I hope you enjoy using Refas as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

2002-08-05

I have finally got round to actually releasing 1.0 which for some reason I left just sitting there not doing anything for an age. I have started work again now so things will be going a little slower again. I have got to promote Refas a bit as well to try and get people to use it. I am pretty sure that the release that was there before was also a version 1.0 but I have uploaded it again to make sure and this time I have labelled it as 1.0 so that I can tell ;-)

2002-07-17

Well it looks like release 1.0 is ready now. I have set it up so that it can be purchased online. That was a big step and quite exciting. I am debating whether to create a branch in the repository now or wait until the first bug is found. I am also kicking myself for not keeping this more up to date.

2002-05-30

Fixed the earlier build that was broken. I decided to remove the Xerces package from the system because an XML parser is now built into the core library. Unfortunately NetBeans (my IDE of choice) comes with Xerces so that build was working in NetBeans and then failing at deploy time. DOH!!!! It wasn't a very serious problem formatting stopped working for a while. Oh and I have finally completed the change from year_number to issue_number in the XML - that was harder than it should have been :-)

2001-10-25

Refas was started. I am writing this retrospectively since the web site wasn't here when I started it. The date is the cvs date for the first commit of the main class.