[Jchassis-devel] news

[<sjs...@ya...>]

Latest JChassis news ...

Happy New Year to all!

I haven't been sending much mail over the Xmas break,
although I have been happily coding away at times.

I have removed some developers that haven't
been contributing, but they are welcome to
rejoin after the first release, or before 
if they have something urgent to contribute.
Hopefully they will still get this mailing list
traffic.

Some bits and pieces I have been developing:

 - a more advanced command line parser component
 - an ANSI terminal controller (think curses/ncurses
   for Java): this allows you to have colours and
   windows in a text console that is ANSI/vt100
   compliant (eg. Linux virtual consoles and xterms, 
   etc. - aparently MS Windows console as well - yet
   to check this)

Send me mail if you want more detail ... all of
the code in in the "proto" module.

Most importantly, I've have prototyped the code
required to place JChassis service implementations
and other classes and resources into special JAR 
files ("MAR" files"??). These files contain an
XML file that defines the "module" contained in 
the JAR file, and other modules that it depends
on. I have also prototyped a tool that can add
and remove MAR files to/from a repository such
that dependencies are always satisfied 
(think apt-get, but for software components 
instead of applications and libraries). This
ensures the developer has a palette of components
that satisfied each others' requirements (provided
they are used properly in the application).

I think once the "module" work above is properly 
design and completed, we will be ready for the 
first release. I think the modules work is necessary
since developers will be able to easily download 
components and get the dependencies right using the
tools we provide.

Cheers,
Sam.

=====
Sam Stainsby

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