Friday, June 15, 2007

Version 1.5.0 released!

Today we released V1.5.0 of Open Quark.

We managed to complete the standalone JAR feature to our satisfaction, and there are quite a number of Eclipse plug-in enhancements in this version, including wizards for setting up new projects and modules - hitherto a little awkward, as this had to be done manually.

Documentation is also updated and available in the Eclipse plug-in for the first time as help.

See the main Quark Framework page for more details, and please provide feedback on the CAL Language Google Group.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

A worthwhile short delay?

OK, we think we're going to delay the release to next week now. We made the call because of the potential to include a cool extra feature that we think may benefit a cross-section of users. This is the ability to have Quark produce small 'baked' JARs containing only the executable Java classes and an entry point to a CAL function of type [String] -> () i.e. a main function taking string arguments.

I use the term "baked" above, because such JARs will not include a Workspace with the metadata necessary to be able to use the contents dynamically (such as in the many cases where we use Quark as a functional metaprogramming library for Java, typically creating transient functions under application control). However, this is great for writing straightforward apps and utilities. Being small and having much less metadata to load up to support dynamic programming means that startup time is drastically improved too with this deployment model.

So, hopefully we'll be able to dot the I's and cross the T's on this feature for next week, and if it makes it into the next revision then we will probably badge it as Open Quark 1.5.