With the Unicode-related functions in Prague growing out of size, I moved them into a new library called 'Babylon'. It will provide all the functionality defined in the Unicode standard (it is not Unicode but ISO 10646 compliant as it uses 32bit wide characters internally) and is written in C++. Since it only depends on Prague it can be used independent of Berlin. More information can be found here.

Berlin now uses Babylon instead of Prague::Unicode (which is now obsolete and was removed from the CVS-tree) for its text processing.

The UnidrawKit starts working. The client registers a catalogue of tools, and the selected tool then intercepts events (by means of 'Manipulator' objects) to create and modify client side objects (Unidraw::Component). As expected, a couple of bugs and missing features have been fixed en passant... Here is a screenshot of the first Unidraw editor in action.

While the last build system was already quite good, it seemed far to complex and messy. The new system aims to be small, yet flexible. One of the new features is the ability to build anywhere, i.e. in particular outside the source tree. This implies that we now can maintain multiple build trees depending on the same sources. On a different note, we now have some first draft of a UnidrawKit. The goal is to port John Vlissides' Unidraw framework to Berlin, which provides the backbone for domain specific graphical editors (diagrams and graphs, vector graphics, UI builders, may be even 3D modellers,...). Here is a first minimal drawing editor, similar to Fresco's 'figgy'.

There has been quite a bit of work going on over the summer, which flows into this release. Even though there's nothing visibly new, the architecture changed quite dramatically: First of all, there is the port to the POA, which triggered a number of changes. We now have working memory management and the server is somewhat more fault tolerant. Also, Berlin has a new abstract console layer which makes it independent of GGI and allows it to be ported to even more platforms. Finally, the first steps towards generic 3D support are done, some interfaces for 'Primitives' and a 'DrawingKit3D' are part of this release. You can pick it up at our page at SourceForge.

With amazingly little effort we finished the move to omniORB3 and the POA architecture. This is very exciting because finally people can try out different ORBs and see what the speed and memory footprint is.

After some busy weeks of profiling and bug hunting we have finally decided that it's time to release again and this time increase the major number by one. This means we consider this a somewhat self-contained and coherent version. This shot demonstrates what we are able to do now: 3D rotations and freetype support. What you don't see on the image, is the dramatic speed increase you'll notice when actually running it.

Phew. After some hard fighting with autoconf and make the new build system is in place and the release out the door. It features a total of 8 (eight !) packages. Now we need to document how to use them... Meanwhile, Graydon improved the libArt DrawingKit so it features transformable glyphs.

The website redesign that's been in the works for a while has finally gone live; you're looking at it. Hopefully this rehaul will make the site much easier to navigate while still looking as nice as it did before. Email me if you have any problems, suggestions for usability, pages that should be linked but aren't, want to take my job, etc. I should also take this opportunity to plug Latte, which is the wonderful little text-processing, html-outputting language the new site is written in. You can see the raw sources in the web module's site2 directory in CVS.

Berlin now has its first non-demo application, a Jabber client. It's somewhat proof-of-concept at the moment, but it already supports multiple simultaneous conversations. You can check it out on the screenshots page.

Even though the last weeks have been quiet, lots of things have been going on. We have a completely overhauled kit loading mechanism which allows to select among the implementations of the same interface via attribute lists. The kits in general have been refactored quite a bit. The WidgetKit has become much cleaner in the process. Finally a terminal widget brings us really close to our goals for this second milestone. See it in action here.

Rather unnoticed, release 0.1.4 hit the wire a couple of weeks back. Since then, we have been concentrating on the TextKit and the Viewport, both to get closer to the terminal we are so keen on.

Here is what we have so far: Two new demos, one featuring text input (yes, using Unicode) and the other a viewport which you can manipulate through a panner or two scrollbars. Here is a screenshot.