I have the great pleasure to announce that the version 0.44 of the Ecere Cross-Platform SDK,
codenamed "Ryoan-ji", is now available. It is the first "official" Open Source release of Ecere
(not a draft, or preview).
The Windows installer is available at https://launchpad.net/ecere/trunk/0.44/ ... -win32.exe
Our Ubuntu Linux PPA on Launchpad is at https://code.launchpad.net/~ecere-team/+archive/ppa
To add our Ecere PPA to your Ubuntu system you can simply do:
Code: Select all
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ecere-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
Code: Select all
sudo apt-get install ecere-sdk
It took us some time and great efforts to get there, but we now have what should be a stable and complete release.
A quick history of what happened since 0.43 (September 2008):
- In December 2008, we had released a first open-source draft, 0.44 draft 1, which could bootstrap itself from GCC.
- In March 2010, we released 0.44 preview 1, with some new features, bug fixes, and new bugs. We also got a new website design, with new phpBB forums.
- In May 2011, we adopted Git as our version control system. Our source repository is hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/ecere/sdk
Now all this is fixed, and it should be a breeze to get the Ecere SDK installed on your system in no time at all, to try out all the cool samples and features!
What's new in this version:
- Native Window decorations, toolbar and tool tips
- A new JSON-based .epj project format and powerful project settings, with powerful per File X Config X Platform Project Settings
- Internationalization support, with Chinese and Spanish available by setting the LANGUAGE environment variable to zh_CN or es_ES
- SQLite and Oracle drivers for Ecere Data Access (EDA)
- Improved eC Distributed Objects
- Less memory leaking on parsing code
- Line Numbers in the Code Editor
- Settings for multiple compilers (e.g. allowing to set up cross-compilers, different GCC versions...)
- Support for ccache and distcc to speed up your builds
- New Credits and License dialogs for the About box
- A bunch of new samples, PowerPoint Tutorials and extras (SSLSocket, Audio, WIA Scanning...)
- Coursework to accompany the Tao
- A new updated Windows installer, with MinGW (GCC 4.4.0 and GDB 7.0 were selected for working best)
- PPAs for Ubuntu working on both 32 and 64 bit machines, for Lucid Lynx, Maverick Meerkat, Natty Narwhal, Oneiric Ocelot and Precise Pangolin
- Numerous tracked issues were resolved, see the complete list at: http://ecere.com/mantis/changelog_page.php
For those of you who do not yet have an account on the forums, and wish to register, please let me know of your user name for activation, because I unfortunately cannot distinguish spammers from real users.
Now that internationalization support is complete, I would like to invite you all to contribute a translation of Ecere in your native language.
You can use the nice collaborative interface on Launchpad for this purpose, at http://translations.launchpad.net/ecere
An article I wrote on Cross-Platform Development with the Ecere SDK will be featured in this month's issue of the Software Developer's Journal - http://en.sdjournal.org/ .
It should come out within the next week, I invite you to check it out. It's an excellent introduction to coding in eC with the Ecere SDK!
For an overview of what lies ahead for Ecere, you can take a peek at http://launchpad.net/ecere/+milestones
We will now focus on deploying Ecere applications on the Android platform.
All the best,
Jerome