Ecere SDK v0.44 "Ryoan-ji" -- The first official Open Source Release of Ecere!

[Jerome St-Louis]

Dear friends, contributors and Ecere community members,

I have the great pleasure to announce that the official version 0.44 of Ecere, codenamed "Ryoan-ji", is now available. 

It is the first "official" Open Source release of Ecere (not a draft, or preview).

The Windows installer is available at http://launchpad.net/ecere/trunk/0.44/+download/setup-ecere-0.44-win32.exe

Our Ubuntu Linux PPA on Launchpad is at https://code.launchpad.net/~ecere-team/+archive/ppa

To add our Ecere PPA to your Ubuntu system you can simply do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ecere-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update

And then to install the Ecere SDK:

sudo apt-get install ecere-sdk

The source tarball for the Ecere SDK 0.44 is at http://github.com/ecere/sdk/tarball/0.44

It took us some time and great efforts to get there, but we now have what should be a stable and complete release.

A quick history of what happened since 0.43 (September 2008):

• In December 2008, we had released a first open-source draft, 0.44 draft 1, which could bootstrap itself from GCC.
• In March 2010, we released 0.44 preview 1, with some new features, bug fixes, and new bugs. We also got a new website design, with new phpBB forums. 
• In May 2010, we adopted Git as our version control system. Our source repository is hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/ecere/sdk

Both 0.44d1 and 0.44pre1 had some issues, and were lacking a Windows installer and proper Ubuntu PPAs.

Now all this is fixed, and it should be a breeze to get the Ecere SDK installed on your system in no time at all, to try out all the cool samples and features!

What's new in this version:

• Native Window decorations, toolbar and tool tips
• A new JSON-based .epj project format and powerful project settings, with powerful per File X Config X Platform Project Settings
• Internationalization support, with Chinese and Spanish available by setting the LANGUAGE environment variable to zh_CN or es_ES
• SQLite and Oracle drivers for Ecere Data Access (EDA)
• Improved eC Distributed Objects
• Less memory leaking on parsing code
• Line Numbers in the Code Editor
• Settings for multiple compilers (e.g. allowing to set up cross-compilers, different GCC versions...)
• Support for ccache and distcc to speed up your builds
• New Credits and License dialogs for the About box
• A bunch of new samples, PowerPoint Tutorials and extras (SSLSocket, Audio, WIA Scanning...)
• Coursework to accompany the Tao
• A new updated Windows installer, with MinGW (GCC 4.4.0 and GDB 7.0 were selected for working best)
• PPAs for Ubuntu working on both 32 and 64 bit machines, for Lucid Lynx, Maverick Meerkat, Natty Narwhal, Oneiric Ocelot and Precise Pangolin
• Numerous tracked issues were resolved, see the complete list at: http://ecere.com/mantis/changelog_page.php

A much needed README was added to the source tree, you can read it online at http://github.com/ecere/sdk#readme

For those of you who do not yet have an account on the forums, and wish to register, please let me know of your user name for activation, because I unfortunately cannot distinguish spammers from real users.

Now that internationalization support is complete, I would like to invite you all to contribute a translation of Ecere in your native language.

You can use the nice collaborative interface on Launchpad for this purpose, at http://translations.launchpad.net/ecere

An article I wrote on Cross-Platform Development with the Ecere SDK will be featured in this month's issue of the Software Developer's Journal - http://en.sdjournal.org/ .

It should come out within the next week, I invite you to check it out. It's an excellent introduction to coding in eC with the Ecere SDK!

For an overview of what lies ahead for Ecere, you can take a peek at http://launchpad.net/ecere/+milestones

We will now focus on deploying Ecere applications on the Android platform.

All the best,

Jerome

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Apologies if you get this e-mail twice. The eC mailing list is not very active and not everyone is on it ;)