tnfox-announce

[Niall D. <s_s...@ne...>]

Homepage: http://www.nedprod.com/TnFOX/
Docs: http://tnfox.sourceforge.net/TnFOX/html/
SVN: http://developer.berlios.de/svn/?group_id=2262

TnFOX v0.87 is finally out after some sixteen months since the v0.86 
release (sorry!). New features include:

* FOX v1.4.35 and FOX v1.6.28 merged.

* 2D and 3D graphing support of arbitrary datasets rendered using 
OpenGL along with official Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) support.

* Modular building support. You can now build separate no-GUI, SQL 
database and Graphing sublibraries. You can also toggle whether large 
proportions of FOX and TnFOX are compiled into your library or not, 
making for a very slimline standalone executables if you so choose.

* Added child process device i/o class QChildProcess. You can now 
redirect i/o and manage child processes on all supported platforms.

* An automated test suite now can perform full regression testing on 
all supported platforms. It stores its results inside a SQLite3 
database and can output the database in HTML format (as you can see 
on the TnFOX website).

* TnFOX is now completely portable to any architecture (not just 
Intel based ones).

* Fixed stack backtracing on exception throw for Windows (which had 
become broken thanks to Microsoft) and added support for stack 
backtracing on Linux via glibc.

* Even more performance increases. Tn now runs on Linux slightly 
faster than Windows!

* Lots of bugs (some major) fixed.

* New platforms now officially supported: Apple Mac OS X (using 
Apple's X11 server), CoLinux and Microsoft Windows Vista. TnFOX is 
fully & officially supported on all 32 bit and 64 bit platforms.

Note that the v1.4 based branch will be dropped from this release 
onwards - only v1.6 or later shall be used in subsequent TnFOX 
releases. Anyone still using the v1.4 (non-Unicode) branch will need 
to upgrade.

FreeBSD precompiled binaries have not been provided this time round 
due to a (current) lack of a FreeBSD installation. There is no reason 
why it shouldn't compile and run.

The Python bindings have been much improved since the last release, 
but still aren't quite there (hence not supplying binaries). I am 
afraid that they are not a high priority for me currently, but I hope 
to get back to them relatively soon. I have a new computer whose 
extra power should greatly ease compiling & debugging them.

Cheers,
Niall