Ecere Blogging

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.