Ecere Blogging

Hi guys.

Some news in the Ecere world:

As you might have noticed, I started updating the website a bit. We have a new front page with a nice big obvious download button, a new mascott (Oliver the Sea Otter - Ollie). There is still quite a bit more refinements to the rest of the web site content when I find the time to do so.

A new pre-release of the version 0.44 of the SDK has been released. Click the aforementioned big button on the front page to grab it and build it.

To install it on Windows, first install the 0.43 SDK to get the right MinGW setup. You’ll need to rename make.exe in Program Files/Ecere SDK/mingw/bin to mingw32-make.exe as we’ve fixed the new version by default to comply with that MinGW standard. Then just hit mingw32-make on the new 0.44pre1 source code. Then you can do make install (make sure you are administrator if you are on vista/win7) to update your installation if you are.

To install it on Linux, either grab the PPA at launchpad.net (see this thread for detailed instructions, potential issues and updates on that package) if you are on Ubuntu, or just hit ‘make’ in the source code and then ’sudo make install’.

We do have a newer MacOS X build! Just click the fancy rainbow apple on the main page. It still has some of the same issues it had before (Random bus errors, X11 window coordinates issues when resizing/moving things around), and apparently the source won’t build on Snow Leopard. Contributors who want to improve the Mac OS X support are more than welcome!

We now have a nice new forums system at http://www.ecere.com/forums/. The ones we had before wasn’t quite working for any of us. I like the new ones, please help us make them livelier than ever! I might in fact from this point on use that medium for announcements and other things I would otherwise have posted here. Having too many points of contacts (IRC, forums, blog, mailing list…) makes it quite difficult for everyone to focus and exchange all together, so I suggest we just stick to the forums as the general point of contact, and IRC for those who are into it.

So please make sure you register and participate in the new forums, and don’t be surprised if this blog is outdated (as it has been for most of its existence, let’s admit it, so I don’t think anyone will actually be surprised) and if this is the last post.

I’ll be seeing you in the forums and on IRC.

Cheers,

Jerome

Lots of pending modifications since 0.44draft1 have been merged into the repository (too many to enumerate all of them!), paving the way for the forthcoming 0.44 release.  A second draft version (0.44draft2) is expected within a week.  Several important changes are already active in the repository:

Core eC:
——–

* Class: ’size’ member of the main class Class has been separated into typeSize and structSize which should result in simpler code (especially in templates) in addition to being a lot easier to deal with.
* Map: the Map container is being the focus of a stress test, both in terms of performance evaluation and consistency.

Drivers:
——–

* X11: a major CPU bottleneck that occured during the initialization of the IDE, making bitmaps to be loaded as if they contained transparency information, is now fixed.

Tools:
——

* Builds: everything has been rebuilt and tested, with positive reports on recently supported architectures like PowerPC.
* Documentor: API documentation has seen a lot of recent updates which are tightly integrated in the IDE/Documentor for easy access.

* COM: some changes related to the class finder introduced regressions, and have been backed off for the time being.
* IDE: improvements enabled the builder process to run slighthly faster while using less CPU.

Ecere Corp. would like to thank all contributors and supporters of Ecere SDK, (alphabetically) Charlie, Jérôme, Joey, and Redj.

Well folks it seems Ecere has not been selected as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code 2009… Maybe we will try applying again next year. Sorry for all enthusiastic students who were hoping to participate with us.

The list of all accepted mentor organizations is now available.

Of course contributors are still welcome to participate in any of the projects on our roadmap. You won’t get the nice $$$ bonus, but you’ll still get the chance to learn a lot and work with us on making great software even much better.

Cheers,

Jerome

Today is the mentor organizations application deadline for the Google Summer of Code 2009 program in which Ecere really hopes to participate.

We’ve put together an ideas list up for prospective students. It’s available here:

http://www.ecere.com/GSoC_Ideas.html

If we get the chance to participate in this program, this could mean a lot to Ecere in terms of enhanced features and usability, as well as stirring a more active open source collaboration community. Please wish us the best of luck in being awarded this golden opportunity. We will keep you informed whether we were accepted or not as soon as the list of accepted mentor organizations is available (March 18, next Wednesday).

Whether we’re accepted or not, the projects mentioned in the ideas list are of course available for interested contributors to work on, and they draft the roadmap ahead for the new developments in Ecere for 2009.

We’ll also be working on the transition to a reorganized Ecere web site which hopefully will more adequately serve the community of users and developers, and present Ecere in a clearer and more attractive way.

On a side note, I realize it has been a while since last update… I have been mostly busy improving and putting to test the Ecere Data Access and its SQLite driver. There is no new release available yet, but in the coming weeks a second source draft of 0.44 should be released as soon as the most critical current issues are resolved.

Cheers!

Hello everyone, sorry for the very few updates in the past few months.

Much development has happened lately focused on what has always been the calling for Ecere: a Free Open Source Software status, as well as a greater facility to deploy across multiple platforms.

The next major release (0.44) was to reach these objectives, and I was hoping for it to be ready earlier this fall.

Unfortunately things moved a little slower than expected, but I still have a present for the enthusiasts on this Christmas day: a fully automated self building Ecere source package. It makes use of a much improved bootstrapping system (thanks Joey Adams for thinking it through) directly generated from the actual eC sources of the compiler.

Recent work was done to test and improve the support for platforms such as Mac OS X and big-endian systems (such as PowerPC, PlayStation 3 Cell processor, SPARC machines, …). I will call this a Source Draft, because it has not undergone much testing yet (although this SDK version is what makes up my own development tools). I will not provide binaries at this moment either. An official 0.44 release should follow up within the next few weeks. This draft release however marks the very first officially open source (under the revised BSD license) Ecere SDK release.

Contributions will be most welcome, and much efforts will be put in the coming weeks to increase the support for a community by establishing a clear roadmap, improving the web site, and coordinating interested developers. You can help us make this upcoming release the most stable Ecere SDK to date. Please note that any contribution will need to have its copyright renounced to Ecere, which will then relicense the code to everyone under the BSD license.

Despite being mainly a the first open source release, this new version features many improvements such as an automatic bootstrapping/build system, an SQLite driver for the Ecere Data Access system, additional IDE configurations enabling the integration of cross compilers, lots of bug fixes (most likely some new bugs as well) … and a tab control.

Download Ecere SDK 0.44 Draft 1 Sources

Merry Christmas, and I wish you all a wonderful year 2009, may you find internal peace and happiness in these fast pace and often challenging times.

It has been more than a month since the last blog post, but both sections 1 and 2 of The Ecere Tao of Programming are finally completed. The first sections teach mostly the aspects that eC shares with C, while at the same time pointing out the innovations of eC. The second section teaches the object oriented concepts introduced with eC.

These sections together are intended to teach eC programming to both new programmers and experienced programmers alike (regardless of the background experience, be it C, C++, C#, Java, VB…). They therefore make up the official eC programming guide.

The remaining sections of the book will focus on teaching the various functionalities available in the Ecere SDK, such as the GUI toolkit and 2D/3D graphics engine.

I would like to welcome everyone to join us in #ecere on irc.freenode.net.

I hope a dedicated IRC channel will help to slowly build a strong community of contributors, developers and end-users of Ecere technologies.

Welcome everyone to Ecere Blogging!

I plan to post here on a regular basis the latest achievements on the Ecere Software Development Kit and the multitude of Ecere applications under development, as well as any related random thoughts which I decide to share with you.

Hopefully, this medium will help stir interest in the Ecere SDK as a development platform and contribute to the growth of a dynamic community of developers.