Framework releases

Back in October 2019 I pointed out that I didn’t normally do roadmaps of where the framework was going but did one anyway. Looking at how long it has taken to get from there to here I think I’m generally correct not to do roadmaps… I’ve been very busy with client work and the pandemic has caused us some disruption, but thankfully not too much. However, I think the main reason that it has taken so long to get the 7.0 release out the door is that it has been constantly evolving and I had client work for my US mail handling client that was pushing features “forward” from 6.9.x and client work for other clients was pushing changes “backwards” from the linux and MacOS version (8.0). Keeping the various planned releases up to date and coherent was more work than I expected. I won’t try that again…

Anyway, here we are. 7.0 has been released and adds a new tools library, CoreTools, which will become cross platform by the time we get to an 8.0 release. In 7.0 it’s just a code shuffling exercise with no functional changes as almost every file changes due to include path adjustments so that the code could be used on Unix platforms as well as on Windows platforms. The next step is 7.1 and I’m almost at the point where this can be released. This begins to add some functional changes but only those required for cross platform compilation; it’s still only Windows. 7.2 is a little further off and includes all the functional changes and bug fixes from 8.0 that didn’t make it into 6.9.5. The “new sockets” redesign is still coming, it’s fully operational in 8.0 as it is the main reason that we can do handle EPoll and KQueue socket backends. It will, likely, end up in a 7.x release, but it’s not in 7.2.