New release of AXR

[Jake Petroules]

Hi everyone,

For those of you out there who don't frequent our IRC channel I thought I'd post a little update on what's going on with our next release.

A lot has been going on with development since our last release on the 17th of June. I joined the project around the beginning of August and since then I've been working with the team to do significant cleanup and organization of the codebase, most importantly having modularized each of the major components of AXR into their own repositories to allow individual teams to work more independently and have our releases go more smoothly.

I've converted the various ways in which the project was built and packaged for each platform with a unified CMake+CPack build system that will automatically build a complete redistributable package faster than you can say git clone <url> && git submodule update --init --recursive && ./configure && make distribution. Might look verbose but compared to before it is a massive improvement!

Perhaps one of the most important changes to the code itself is that we've eliminated nearly all the dependencies on external libraries that were present as of the last release, including but not limited to: Cairo, Pango, Boost, Expat, SDL, Cocoa, glib, and their very long list of transitive dependencies. We've replaced the functionality that those libraries provided with Qt, which itself has virtually no external dependencies and makes deployment easier, distribution sizes smaller, increases platform parity and allows us to develop features more quickly and minimize the number of bugs from the use of a single highly tested and stable library with a consistent API.

We've also implemented some more features and fixed a huge number of bugs. Since the last release there have been a whopping 570 commits to our Git repository for the core module alone, which is almost 70% of that repository's entire history! 0.4.8 will be a truly monumental release. For a summarized list of changes, please see: https://github.com/axr/core/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

Another important part of our workflow changes is that all of our repositories are now set up to build in the open source Travis Continuous Integration system, which has made a significant improvement in reducing the number of broken builds.

I've been working hard on packaging everything with CPack so that we can have a stable set of packages to distribute for testing via our website. I'm currently working on the final touches for the runtime package and I'm fairly confident now that we can do a release tomorrow, November 26th. We will have packages available for Windows (32-bit), Mac (64-bit), and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit Debian and RPM packages plus a distribution independent gzipped tarball). The version of core will be 0.4.8 (0.47 has been retroactively tagged 0.4.7 to match changes to our versioning scheme) and the browser app will be 0.1.

PS - I have also been experimenting with the planned ActiveX/NPAPI browser plugin, based on the open source Firebreath project. Check it out: https://github.com/axr/plugin

Jake Petroules

Petroules Corporation (www.petroules.com)

Email: jake.pe...@petroules.com

Telephone: +1 (970) 587-3821

[Zisu Andrei]

Good job Jake! Can't wait to check it out.

Yours, 

   Andrei

[Miro Keller]

Yay! Awesome! :D

Miro

Sent from my iPhone

[Knu]

Way to go mate!