Announcing XOTcl 0.84. **********************

WHAT IS XOTCL?

XOTcl is object-oriented extension of Tcl that was derived from OTcl. In short, XOTcl tries to provide a highly flexible, reflective, component-based, and object-oriented environment. It integrates language support for high level concepts which are not found in other languages, with reasonable performance. It prevails the Tcl programming style and the dynamic/introspective nature of the language, rather than introducing other language's styles and rigidness (such as C++) into Tcl.

RECENT CHANGES IN VERSION 0.84 The most important changes relative to 0.83 are: - Object recreation scheme (instead of destroying object on overwrites; the semantics of recreation can be configured now). - Enhanced destroy and create logic (much more customizable). - Heavily improved compilation support for Windows versions + full test suite running on Win with nmake. - Improved test suite. - XOTcl wrapper for various persistent stores, including Gdbm, Sdbm, TextFile, Mem. These are transparently used for object persistence. - All stores have a new interface resembling the interface to (non-persistent) objects (e.g. set-method writes an entry into the persistent store, unset deletes it from there, etc.). - New static and dynamic analyzer packages for @ metadata and self-documentation facility. - Hierarchical package naming, like xotcl::store::gdbm, xotcl::comm::httpAccess, ... - New package for serialization of workspace contents (either whole workspace, or certain classes/objects) to Tcl file. - Moved callstack information (calledproc, callingproc, callingobject, etc.) into ``self'' command (WARNING: potential incompatibility esp. for filters). - New callstack information ``self next''. - Search process for XOTcl packages improved (see ChangeLog file). - ::xotcl namespace for runtime information. - htmllib by Antti Salonen: HTML Builder for HTML documents. - XOTcl is now thread-savvy. It can be used in Tcl8.3.2+ with tclthread2.2+ extension w/o modifications. However, at the moment, interp memory is freed, when the thread exists, not when the interp is deleted (due to Tcl lacking a proper hook). If somebody needs assistance in bringing it to work with AOLserver 3+, contact Zoran Vasiljevic zoran@archiware.com. - Speedup for xotcl primitives bwtn. 5% (typically) and 55% (next) - Bug fixes & more documentation.

MORE INFO General information about XOTcl and its components can be found at http://www.xotcl.org

Mailing list: http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/mailman/listinfo/xotcl

Best regards,

Gustaf Neumann Uwe Zdun