News

Étoilé 0.4.2 Announcement (yes, the new release promised a long time ago…)

Posted on 11 April 2012 by Quentin Mathé

Étoilé intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. Flexibility and modularity on both User Interface and code level should allow us to scale from handheld to desktop environments.

0.4.2 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included. More will be added during the 0.4.x release series, leading to a user-focused 0.5 release.

Starting with 0.4.2, each new Étoilé release in the 0.4.x serie is a modular release, frameworks and applications are released individually once they are ready over the release timespan. For now 0.4.2 is limited to EtoileFoundation 0.5, but in the next months, other module releases such as LanguageKit or CoreObject are expected. Until we move to 0.4.3, every module we release will belong this new 0.4.2 release.

Released Modules

EtoileFoundation 0.5

EtoileFoundation now comes with a minimalistic but very flexible Metamodel inspired from Smalltalk's FAME. This new release adds many High-Order Messaging and Blocks related extensions that make much easier to manipulate collections. Both Prototype and Trait support have been rewritten from scratch. The Trait implementation now supports the full Trait semantics rather than a limited subset. The Reflection support has also been rewritten and extended, it now follows the Mirror model used in languages such as Self or Newspeak. Among the numerous other additions detailed in the EtoileFoundation NEWS file, you can find a new socket API, a much more random UUID generation especially on Linux, a richer Collection protocol and reusable Collection-oriented Traits.

Highlights

EtoileFoundation is the core framework for all Étoilé projects, providing numerous convenience methods on top of the OpenStep foundation and significantly better support for reflection and metamodel. It also includes a number of extensions to the Objective-C object model, allowing traits and prototypes. This framework is used by most of the rest of Étoilé and provides a number of core functions, such as UUID and XML handling.

Availability

Étoilé 0.4.2 is currently available in code source form only and can be downloaded as several independant module releases:

http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile-0.4.2

It may also be obtained from Subversion with the following command:

svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/etoile/tags/Etoile-0.4.2

More Information

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