The Object-Oriented Library / News: Recent posts

Quite a bit has changed in the last few months. A lot of functionality has been added when it comes to lists, maps, and parsing. UTF-8 compatible string functions are in progress, including advanced manipulation of files that should save a lot of work when it comes to parsing through files. I've included more advanced error checking techniques, which allows for catching error quicker and keeps old tests that can be modified for simpler debugging of old code. Lastly, I've been writing documentation. I only have made available the raw xml files in the website at toolc.sourceforge.net. Sometime, hopefully soon, I'll work at writing a script to parse it and put it into pretty html files and add them to the headers in the source. We'll see.

For the first alpha release, implementing regular expressions needs to be completed as well as the re-working of the list objects, which currently is under development in a separate branch of the project. After that, maybe a little documentation and then some packaging for release. I estimate it may take a week or two.

TOOL will now use Subversion for controlling the latest source code. You can download the source from the repository and compile it for testing purposes, although I still don't have any official releases yet. Regardless, there a lot of useful tools, some of which are only partially implemented. If there's something you want, go ahead and write a tool for it and submit it or make a request.

Since I got a job for the summer, I haven't been able to devote as much time to F/OSS development, although I'm making a push again. Mainly, there's a few more tools I want to implement in TOOL, then a bit of cleanup and testing, followed by a release. Right now, to give you a clue, I have tools for creating variable length lists, a references system for keeping track of objects, tools for TCP as well as UDP, and a small implementation for loading and saving images using bitmaps. All this uses an object system similar to that found in object-oriented languages and uses a referencing system similar to that found in GTK+ while working with both GNU/Linux and Windows. I'm working on making a type of INI-file parser, but it'll work on various styles of configuration files. I can't give an estimate on when I'll be ready to release.