Thursday, August 30, 2007

Sneak preview

Our Summer intern, Andrew Eisenberg has been busy working on how to embed CAL fragments directly inline Java source within Eclipse. This is Andrew's last week before he returns to the University of British Columbia to complete his PhD. Accordingly, Andrew has made some videos to demonstrate his work.

We will shortly make the software and other collateral available, but by way of a 'sneak preview' the videos are now accessible for viewing online.

The demo is in four parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Those who just want to cut to the chase may be able to skip right to Part 4, which offers a full worked scenario and discusses some more advanced features.

1.6 in the wild!

Yesterday, the Quark team completed another release and so the Quark Framework for Java V1.6 is now available in the usual place.

This release is quite rich in features, with a number of new libraries added that we hope will be of interest to people.

As usual, we are really keen for people to provide all kinds of constructive feedback on our Google Group, and of course the team is now setting about the next release.

Additionally, we expect to have a some very interesting auxiliary work posted up soon - the results of our intern Andrew Eisenberg. Andrew is just finishing up his time with us and preparing to return to the University of British Columbia to continue with his PhD. All will be revealed (we hope) within the next few weeks.

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Long time no post...

...mostly because of my nice long Summer vacation :-)

While I was away though, the team produced release 1.5.1. This release has a range of improvements as listed in the release notes.

An interesting experimental feature is the ability to share the state of a program across multiple concurrently executing threads (as opposed to the ability we've had for ages to concurrently compile and execute logic that doesn't mutually update states of a common program). We anticipate that this feature will grow into a convenient and fully-supported feature of the framework. In the meantime however, it allows people to play with "parallel CAL" so long as they are prepared to do some work to set up scenarios and are happy to take a performance hit.

The benchmarks at the "Computer Language Benchmark Game" site were updated with 1.5.1.

Looking forward to 1.6 now, we expect to deliver a bevy of features and new libraries. Over the next several weeks, some details will be posted on the forum to whet appetites and solicit feedback.