This application is Free Software, issued under the GNU General Public Licence. Before downloading, please read the licence, in particular sections 15 and 16.
The Garden Notebook is a desktop application written in Java 20. Currently, only a Windows version is available.
Warning - there is a bug in version 2.6.0. If MySQL Connector/J is present in the CLASSPATH the application will fail to start. This is true for Connector/J 8.0.19 and possibly earlier versions. This was fixed in version 2.7.0.
Version 3.1.2 is a maintenance release. Several bugs have been fixed and some of the code has been tidied up.
The main change is that the application can now be installed with a standard Windows .msi installer - see the Quick Start page.
This version includes hsqldb as an in-process database server so you do not need to pre-install MySQL, MariaDB or MS SQLServer; both MySQL 8 and MariaDB 10 are still supported. If you prefer to use MySQL, MariaDB or MS SQLServer you need to install and configure them yourself, setting up whatever user(s) you wish to use.
(If you have a NAS device for backup or streaming, it may well have MariaDB as an available app, easy to install; Synology devices certainly do.)
(If you are not confident with installing MySQL, MariaDB or SQLServer, please do not attempt it; use the in-process server).
The download contains various files to initialise an appropriate database.
Note that the user that you use to initialise the database requires SUPER privileges.
If you use hsqldb, when you first log-in you will be asked to specify a database name and a folder to hold the files. You can then let the application create an initial database for you. The ‘empty’ version is if you intend to populate the database from a JSON dump; the ‘initialised’ version has some basic entries to get you started. See the Getting Started pages.
This download is packaged as a .zip file.
Download the GardenNotebook zip file (70,889,145 bytes; 70,889,472 bytes on disk; expanding to 187MB on disk). I recommend you scan the download with your preferred anti-virus tool(s).
You should verify the integrity of the downloaded file using the hash file. You can generate a hash key using:
After downloading, extract the .zip file into a convenient directory (it does not need to be in the Program Files or Program Files(x86) directory). In the top level of the expanded directory is a ReadMe.txt file describing what you need to do next. There is also a DatabaseDetails folder with the necessary files to initialise the database for the application; instructions are in the ReadMe.txt file.
Under the requirements for Free Software the source code must be made available; The source code is available here, with module level build scripts only. I intend to create a GitHub repository for the project with full Maven build scripts.
There is a problem with short-form dates, at least in the UK locale. A date entered as, say, 4/7/22 will be interpreted as 4th July AD22, NOT AD2022. This is a known error in the underlying Java libraries and is outside my control. I have inserted a ‘bodge’ to alleviate it: a date that has a year value less than 2000 will have 2000 added to it. Clearly this only makes sense if you are using the Gregorian calendar (if you are using something else, please contact me). This works in most places but, currently, not for Comment dates; so please check any dates when you alter them - they should show up as, e.g. 04/07/2022. I hope the bug will be fixed one day.
The application is now pretty well ‘feature complete’, at least as far as my original intentions are concerned. I will continue to fix bugs and update the third party libraries that I use (hsqldb, log4j2) and use the latest releases of Java as they become available (3.1.1 was built using Java 20). The code base also needs a ‘a good bottoming’.
I hope to further develop the Help system.
The ‘commercial’ RDBMSs supported (MySQL, MariaDB and MS SQLServer) expect users to use proper secure connections; currently the application forces weak, ‘old style’ connections which are fine for personal use on a single PC or home LAN. I need to research using up-to-date security methods.