I committed some changes that will allow for bidirectional textflow according to the Unicode standard. The editable text demo uses the new VisualTextBuffer, so give it a try if you can enter hebrew text with your keyboard.

After some furious work Stefan moved the Console, an abstraction of the underlying Input-/Output system, into a module. So you can now select whichever Console you want when starting up the server. The reason for this was a dependency issues Bastian discovered when building his debian packages: All Kits implicitly depended on the graphic's library used by the Console (GGI, SDL, ...). The bad news: Currently only GGI and SDL consoles are operational.

Stephen Davies has spend some time profiling Berlin and found that a lot of time is spend inside the ORB. The omniORB developers were asked about possible optimisations and a day later those were already in their upcoming omniORB 4 release. Berlin uses them now and Stephen reports a massive speedup. For further research on ORB-based optimisations Stefan ported Berlin over to TAO, which offers more optimisation options then omniORB. This code is not very well tested yet, but it seems to work.

Alexander Johannesen is working on a new website for Berlin. It will have a structure that will hopefully make it easier for people to get into Berlin.

I have spend my time building and debugging some code for bidirectional textflow. I hope to get it into a presentable state before new years eve...

With all these new features we are heading for a new release, hopefully hitting a server near you early next year. For now you will have to check out our sources from CVS. Stay tuned for more exciting news:-)

Stanislav Ievlev has just informed me that the russian ALT Linux distribution has a and a of Berlin. He said the RPM is specific to ALT Linux, but the SRPM should work for any RPM-based distribution.

I had trouble downloading the files with Mozilla, but I was able to retrieve them with a normal (passive) FTP client. Give them a try;-)

Thanks to Bastian Blank's work we now have debian packages! Try them out and give bug reports. They are available at incoming.debian.org or people.debian.org, but should get moved into the unstable distribution soon.

Robert Jacolin spend a lot of time translating the Berlin Tutorial and the Berlin Manual into french. Those documents are available from his homepage (see the new page) or from our page}.

Not much is happening these days, but still, there is some new code from time to time. Today it's a couple of fixes to get basic 3D Primitive support up and running, so Tobias has something to show next week in Stuttgart at the LinuxTag. It's not much, mind you. Here is a little teaser.

A new release just hit the wire, featuring lots of new and interesting things, such as support for a number of different consoles, a GGIKit for animation and client side rendering, a UnidrawKit for graphical editors, and lots more.

Some demo clients written with Java are working (see here):

• a Mailnews client (using the Mozilla Mailnews backend) (it is not usable: it can only list folders so far)
• a primitive XHTML browser
• a XML tree viewer.

One of the advantages of using CORBA so fully is that of process and location transparency. This screenshot shows a Graphic, a node of the display graph, implemented entirely in Python by reimplementing the appropriate CORBA interfaces in Python. The server itself was not even recompiled to use this new Graphic; it just worked! Of course there is a speed penalty due to the context switches, but this leads to exciting opportunities for RAD using Python. Once tested, redesigned, optimised etc, the Python prototype can then be reimplemented in C++ in a short time to run at full speed.

In Unicode 3.1 the requirements for Unicode conformance will be changed. So Babylon will be fully Unicode compliant once version 3.1 is out. This is great news (especially since I don't even need to do anything;-)

I hope to have more time soon, so that I will be able to add Unicode conformant code for bidirectional textflow.