[4442] in comp.os.os2.announce archive
BETA: First release candidate for CIDLib C++ Class Libraries 1.0
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dean Roddey)
Tue Dec 15 22:48:02 1998
To: os2ann.DISCUSS@bloom-picayune.mit.edu
Date: 15 Dec 1998 20:02:00 -0400
From: droddey@charmedquark.com (Dean Roddey)
Reply-To: droddey@charmedquark.com (Dean Roddey)
Reply-to: droddey@charmedquark.com (Dean Roddey)
[Followups directed to comp.os.os2.programmer.tools]
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I posted this here (though the reference release is currently only
available for NT and VC++) because this new release is very portable
and is expected to have Visual Age support as soon as VAge 4.0
becomes a reality, and also because other might want to provide
ports to other platforms and development environments.
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I have posted version 0.990 of the CIDLib C++ Class Libraries
to the Charmed Quark Software web site. This is the first
release candidate for the upcoming 1.0 release. It has been
released in order to give users a chance to see the new
code and comment on it.
So please take a look and send any feedback that you might
have about the architecture, the source code, the packaging,
the documentation, etc... Any feedback would be greatly
appreciated.
The primary improvements in this version are:
1) A new regular expression engine for adding grep style
text searching capabilities to your applications.
2) TCP/IP support, with server and client datagram and
stream sockets, as well as a server socket listener class
and IP address and end point classes.
3) The NT release now required Visual C++ 6.0, which fixes
some monster bugs in version 5.0 that limited CIDLib's
ability to do the right thing.
4) Massive internal changes to the kernel layer to make it
easy for CIDLib to support multiple platforms and multiple
development environments. It is expected that releases
supporting Windows 98 and OS/2 will follow soon after the
1.0 reference release on NT and Visual C++.
5) A movement of the building of CIDLib itself from the
Visual C++ IDE to a custom build utility. This provides
portable build services for CIDLib itself. You just have
to plug in a driver for your development environment. It
provides the services of a make tool, a header dependency
analyzer, a project description system, and a project
dependency management system.
6) Significant improvements in the architecture of the
encryption frameworks.
7) Basic audio support to allow the TAudio class to take
advantage of platform audio capabilities.
8) A lot of improvements in the MakeDocs utility, which
generates HTML code from the ClassDocs files. It creates
much better hyperlinks, making the online class reference
stuff much easier to navigate.
Be aware if you are porting, that the kernel layer class
reference HTML docs are not up to date to some of the
changes. The publically used classes are pretty up to date,
though there is more work to do there in terms of
documenting the exceptions thrown. The kernel docs will
be fully up to date in the next drop (or the 1.0 release
if that is the next drop.)
9) Significantly more offline tutorial docs. These are now
available as HTML (exported from the Word 97 form that they
are written in, which is not the best HTML I've ever seen
but its better than nothing if you don't have Word 97 or
some WP on your platform capable of reading Word 97 files.)
10) Packaging improvements. The new release supports three
levels of release. There is a binary release, which is just
the stuff needed on a client machine to support CIDLib
apps (i.e. the files you need to distribute.) There is a
development release which adds to that the Libs and headers
needed to write CIDLib apps. And there is a source release
which is for those needing to port CIDLib, or those who
want to build the debug version in order to be able to
debug from their apps into CIDLib code.
11) The official licensing issues have been worked out and
are documented on the web site.
Its been a huge amount of work, but the fated day is not
far away. So please, please give me any feedback you have
so that they can be incorporated before the 1.0 rlease
form is frozen.
Once again the GUI frameworks have been pushed off in order
to concentrate on providing a portable, powerful, back end
and core set of functionality. Now that these things are in
place, and people are working on porting CIDLib to other
platforms, the GUI work can be tackled more reasonably, so
the plans for the next release at this time definitely
includes getting the GUI frameworks up to a very useable
state. I didn't want to take on the GUI stuff (which is
the most difficult to make portable) in a vacuum where I
did not have other existing ports to test out the results
as I go.
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