First, I'd like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday.


And I'd also like to let you know what you're in for from me with STLSoft (and related projects) in 2008. So, in no particular order:

* STLSoft:
    1. Website. This is finally going to get the professional treatment. It
will have a redesign, be moved to its own server (so stlsoft.org is no
longer synesis.com.au/software/stlsoft), have a blog, have a place for
publishing small (or even large) articles, have tutorials, and a whole lot
more. This should happen in Jan/Feb. Later in the year I may also provide
commercial support facilities.
    2. Documentation. The first phase will be to get the STLSoft
distribution scripts updated and to start re-publishing the Doxygen
generated docs. This should occur in Jan. In a couple more months' time,
once the site re-org is done, I will be providing better and more extensive
documentation, in concert with some other "senior" STLSoft fellows. More on
this at another time ...
    3. 1.10 will be released soon. It will contain several new components -
including an uber-efficient properties-file class - and maybe even a couple
of new projects (of which more later). One important thing is for me to
address all the remaining items on the NG: there are currently 62 marked
unread (i.e. left to process), some of which go back to 2005! Finally,
there'll be a first tranch of some much needed rationalisation of
internal/support files/classes/namespaces, to simplify and reduce
compilation times.
    4. Later in the year I plan, if I get time, to release STLSoft+, which
is a commercial enhancement to STLSoft, supplementing various STLSoft
sub-projects with substantial services.
    5. Support for other new libraries, including xContract (see below)


* Synesis:
    1. The website's going to get a radical reworking (and reduction), to
reflect the commercial emphases of the last few years: development process
consulting, open-source customisation, network-related custom product
development.
    2. All the to-be-released soon (some as back as 2004!) will be removed.
    3. The system tools will be updated (for Linux & Windows, 32 & 64-bit)
    4. Some articles and/or blogs


* "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise"
(http://breakingupthemonolith.com/)
    This is my next book, and is about how to get everything you want from
C++ without compromise, particularly between efficiency, expressiveness and
robustness. It discusses the technologies (in particular the Shims concept
and the Type Tunnel pattern) behind Pantheios and FastFormat, as well as
other techniques for breaking up monolithic software, maximising design
values, and so on. I've been writing it on and off for the last 15 months,
but am about to put in a solid 10 days on it, which should get me to the 50%
completion mark. The rest will be done over weekends over the following 3
months. For anyone that's followed Imperfect C++ & Extended STL (vol 1)
and/or the progression of the STLSoft, Pantheios, recls, FastFormat, flecxx,
VOLE etc. libraries, this is the book that explains it all, including the
Shims concept, the Handle::Ref+Wrapper and Type Tunnel patterns, the
principles of Intersecting Conformance, Irrecoverability and Removeability,
and more. Should be out mid/late 2008.


* Pantheios
    As you may know, this is, IMO, the ultimate logging API library,
affording the user complete robustness (incl. 100% type-safety) and
unmatchable performance characteristics. It is designed to work above any
other logging libraries, so you can have maximal performance combined with
the configurability of, say, log4cxx.
    Pantheios has been in beta for over a year, but is now very close to a
final 1.0 release. The remaining tasks are:
        1. put in xTests (see below) unit and component tests into the build
        2. implement buffering and file-rolling for be.file
        3. website rework
        4. project files for VC++ 2003/5/8 & Borland Turbo C++
        5. update documentation
        6. compatibility with VC++ "safe" compilation
    I've also been involved with some commercial customisations of Pantheios
for companies here in Aus and in the US, who believe that Pantheios offers
them a significant competitive advantage. Who am I to disagree? <g> I can't
comment on what I've been doing, or for whom I've been doing it, but I am,
of course, always available for such work for any clients that believe their
logging requirements are such that they have to eek out the maximum value of
every last processor cycle in the software.


* FastFormat
    FastFormat uses a similar technology to Pantheios to afford total
type-safety and unbeatable performance when formatting text statements. It
fully supports I18N/L10N by the use of numbered arguments; arguments used
more than once are converted only once. It supports arbitrary destinations
of the formatted result by the mechanism of "sinks". There are several stock
sink types, including strings, string arrays, files, speech (currently
Windows only).
    FF is almost ready to go - I've built the makefile template and proved
it on Linux/Mac/Windows with several compilers - and should be out next
week. Am just working through some other stuff first, and then plan to write
the FF chapter for "Monolith" at the time that I release it (and submit
article(s) on it to mags).
    Although my publicity machine has never been the best, I believe that
there should be no reason why FF should not become the de facto standard for
C++ formatting/output, as it addresses all the problems of C's streams,
C++'s IOStreams, and the other open-source "modern" formatting libraries.
Time will tell ... ;-)


* flecxx

    One of the more simplistic messages in "Monolith" is that good libraries
should afford one the ability to communicate with them in the types with
which you're writing your application code, rather than the
lower-level-of-abstraction types in which their interfaces are expressed.
flecxx, to be released in Jan/Feb, is a 100% header-only adaptation layer
library that wraps standard and popular 3rd-party libraries and removes the
need to sully your beautiful code with all those .get(), .c_str(),
.GetSafeHWnd(), etc. calls.


* xTests
    After releasing all these libraries, it's about time I put out the
testing framework I've been using these long years. This is particularly so
because the next release of Pantheios, and every release of FastFormat and
flecxx, will come bundled with the testing framework. Open-sourced and
rebadged as xTests, it'll be available for anyone to use with any projects
sometime soon.
    xTests is deliberately not all that sophisticated, so it's not going to
be a replacement for any xUnit-like library you're using. But it's simple,
and has minimal coupling, and does the job.


* xContract
    Testing's important, but it's only half the software quality assurance
picture.Contracts are the other. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is
this year, and reify all my wild theories about Irrecoverability in the form
of the xContracts library. We'll start with C/C++, then Ruby, and then see
where life takes us after that.



That's a brief summary of my non-commercial effort over the coming year. All those people who've been understandably frustrated about the lack of doc/support with STLSoft should, by the end of '08, have all their issues dequalmed.

A happy new year to all!

:-)

Matt

Go go Matt!!
You inspire to aspire!
Keep up the great work,
Adi

Matthew Wilson wrote:
> First, I'd like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday.
>
>
> And I'd also like to let you know what you're in for from me with STLSoft
> (and related projects) in 2008. So, in no particular order:
>
> * STLSoft:
>     1. Website. This is finally going to get the professional treatment. It
> will have a redesign, be moved to its own server (so stlsoft.org is no
> longer synesis.com.au/software/stlsoft), have a blog, have a place for
> publishing small (or even large) articles, have tutorials, and a whole lot
> more. This should happen in Jan/Feb. Later in the year I may also provide
> commercial support facilities.
>     2. Documentation. The first phase will be to get the STLSoft
> distribution scripts updated and to start re-publishing the Doxygen
> generated docs. This should occur in Jan. In a couple more months' time,
> once the site re-org is done, I will be providing better and more extensive
> documentation, in concert with some other "senior" STLSoft fellows. More on
> this at another time ...
>     3. 1.10 will be released soon. It will contain several new components -
> including an uber-efficient properties-file class - and maybe even a couple
> of new projects (of which more later). One important thing is for me to
> address all the remaining items on the NG: there are currently 62 marked
> unread (i.e. left to process), some of which go back to 2005! Finally,
> there'll be a first tranch of some much needed rationalisation of
> internal/support files/classes/namespaces, to simplify and reduce
> compilation times.
>     4. Later in the year I plan, if I get time, to release STLSoft+, which
> is a commercial enhancement to STLSoft, supplementing various STLSoft
> sub-projects with substantial services.
>     5. Support for other new libraries, including xContract (see below)
>
>
> * Synesis:
>     1. The website's going to get a radical reworking (and reduction), to
> reflect the commercial emphases of the last few years: development process
> consulting, open-source customisation, network-related custom product
> development.
>     2. All the to-be-released soon (some as back as 2004!) will be removed.
>     3. The system tools will be updated (for Linux & Windows, 32 & 64-bit)
>     4. Some articles and/or blogs
>
>
> * "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise"
> (http://breakingupthemonolith.com/)
>     This is my next book, and is about how to get everything you want from
> C++ without compromise, particularly between efficiency, expressiveness and
> robustness. It discusses the technologies (in particular the Shims concept
> and the Type Tunnel pattern) behind Pantheios and FastFormat, as well as
> other techniques for breaking up monolithic software, maximising design
> values, and so on. I've been writing it on and off for the last 15 months,
> but am about to put in a solid 10 days on it, which should get me to the 50%
> completion mark. The rest will be done over weekends over the following 3
> months. For anyone that's followed Imperfect C++ & Extended STL (vol 1)
> and/or the progression of the STLSoft, Pantheios, recls, FastFormat, flecxx,
> VOLE etc. libraries, this is the book that explains it all, including the
> Shims concept, the Handle::Ref+Wrapper and Type Tunnel patterns, the
> principles of Intersecting Conformance, Irrecoverability and Removeability,
> and more. Should be out mid/late 2008.
>
>
> * Pantheios
>     As you may know, this is, IMO, the ultimate logging API library,
> affording the user complete robustness (incl. 100% type-safety) and
> unmatchable performance characteristics. It is designed to work above any
> other logging libraries, so you can have maximal performance combined with
> the configurability of, say, log4cxx.
>     Pantheios has been in beta for over a year, but is now very close to a
> final 1.0 release. The remaining tasks are:
>         1. put in xTests (see below) unit and component tests into the build
>         2. implement buffering and file-rolling for be.file
>         3. website rework
>         4. project files for VC++ 2003/5/8 & Borland Turbo C++
>         5. update documentation
>         6. compatibility with VC++ "safe" compilation
>     I've also been involved with some commercial customisations of Pantheios
> for companies here in Aus and in the US, who believe that Pantheios offers
> them a significant competitive advantage. Who am I to disagree? <g> I can't
> comment on what I've been doing, or for whom I've been doing it, but I am,
> of course, always available for such work for any clients that believe their
> logging requirements are such that they have to eek out the maximum value of
> every last processor cycle in the software.
>
>
> * FastFormat
>     FastFormat uses a similar technology to Pantheios to afford total
> type-safety and unbeatable performance when formatting text statements. It
> fully supports I18N/L10N by the use of numbered arguments; arguments used
> more than once are converted only once. It supports arbitrary destinations
> of the formatted result by the mechanism of "sinks". There are several stock
> sink types, including strings, string arrays, files, speech (currently
> Windows only).
>     FF is almost ready to go - I've built the makefile template and proved
> it on Linux/Mac/Windows with several compilers - and should be out next
> week. Am just working through some other stuff first, and then plan to write
> the FF chapter for "Monolith" at the time that I release it (and submit
> article(s) on it to mags).
>     Although my publicity machine has never been the best, I believe that
> there should be no reason why FF should not become the de facto standard for
> C++ formatting/output, as it addresses all the problems of C's streams,
> C++'s IOStreams, and the other open-source "modern" formatting libraries.
> Time will tell ... ;-)
>
>
> * flecxx
>
>     One of the more simplistic messages in "Monolith" is that good libraries
> should afford one the ability to communicate with them in the types with
> which you're writing your application code, rather than the
> lower-level-of-abstraction types in which their interfaces are expressed.
> flecxx, to be released in Jan/Feb, is a 100% header-only adaptation layer
> library that wraps standard and popular 3rd-party libraries and removes the
> need to sully your beautiful code with all those .get(), .c_str(),
> .GetSafeHWnd(), etc. calls.
>
>
> * xTests
>     After releasing all these libraries, it's about time I put out the
> testing framework I've been using these long years. This is particularly so
> because the next release of Pantheios, and every release of FastFormat and
> flecxx, will come bundled with the testing framework. Open-sourced and
> rebadged as xTests, it'll be available for anyone to use with any projects
> sometime soon.
>     xTests is deliberately not all that sophisticated, so it's not going to
> be a replacement for any xUnit-like library you're using. But it's simple,
> and has minimal coupling, and does the job.
>
>
> * xContract
>     Testing's important, but it's only half the software quality assurance
> picture.Contracts are the other. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is
> this year, and reify all my wild theories about Irrecoverability in the form
> of the xContracts library. We'll start with C/C++, then Ruby, and then see
> where life takes us after that.
>
>
>
> That's a brief summary of my non-commercial effort over the coming year. All
> those people who've been understandably frustrated about the lack of
> doc/support with STLSoft should, by the end of '08, have all their issues
> dequalmed.
>
> A happy new year to all!
>
> :-)
>
> Matt
>
>
>   

Thanks mate, you old charmer ... ;-)


"Adi Shavit" <adish@gentech.co.il> wrote in message news:4774095C.1020202@gentech.co.il...
> Go go Matt!!
> You inspire to aspire!
> Keep up the great work,
> Adi
>
> Matthew Wilson wrote:
> > First, I'd like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday.
> >
> >
> > And I'd also like to let you know what you're in for from me with
STLSoft
> > (and related projects) in 2008. So, in no particular order:
> >
> > * STLSoft:
> >     1. Website. This is finally going to get the professional treatment.
It
> > will have a redesign, be moved to its own server (so stlsoft.org is no longer synesis.com.au/software/stlsoft), have a blog, have a place for publishing small (or even large) articles, have tutorials, and a whole
lot
> > more. This should happen in Jan/Feb. Later in the year I may also
provide
> > commercial support facilities.
> >     2. Documentation. The first phase will be to get the STLSoft
> > distribution scripts updated and to start re-publishing the Doxygen
> > generated docs. This should occur in Jan. In a couple more months' time,
> > once the site re-org is done, I will be providing better and more
extensive
> > documentation, in concert with some other "senior" STLSoft fellows. More
on
> > this at another time ...
> >     3. 1.10 will be released soon. It will contain several new
components -
> > including an uber-efficient properties-file class - and maybe even a
couple
> > of new projects (of which more later). One important thing is for me to
> > address all the remaining items on the NG: there are currently 62 marked
> > unread (i.e. left to process), some of which go back to 2005! Finally,
> > there'll be a first tranch of some much needed rationalisation of
> > internal/support files/classes/namespaces, to simplify and reduce
> > compilation times.
> >     4. Later in the year I plan, if I get time, to release STLSoft+,
which
> > is a commercial enhancement to STLSoft, supplementing various STLSoft
> > sub-projects with substantial services.
> >     5. Support for other new libraries, including xContract (see below)
> >
> >
> > * Synesis:
> >     1. The website's going to get a radical reworking (and reduction),
to
> > reflect the commercial emphases of the last few years: development
process
> > consulting, open-source customisation, network-related custom product
> > development.
> >     2. All the to-be-released soon (some as back as 2004!) will be
removed.
> >     3. The system tools will be updated (for Linux & Windows, 32 &
64-bit)
> >     4. Some articles and/or blogs
> >
> >
> > * "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise"
> > (http://breakingupthemonolith.com/)
> >     This is my next book, and is about how to get everything you want
from
> > C++ without compromise, particularly between efficiency, expressiveness
and
> > robustness. It discusses the technologies (in particular the Shims
concept
> > and the Type Tunnel pattern) behind Pantheios and FastFormat, as well as other techniques for breaking up monolithic software, maximising design values, and so on. I've been writing it on and off for the last 15
months,
> > but am about to put in a solid 10 days on it, which should get me to the
50%
> > completion mark. The rest will be done over weekends over the following
3
> > months. For anyone that's followed Imperfect C++ & Extended STL (vol 1) and/or the progression of the STLSoft, Pantheios, recls, FastFormat,
flecxx,
> > VOLE etc. libraries, this is the book that explains it all, including
the
> > Shims concept, the Handle::Ref+Wrapper and Type Tunnel patterns, the principles of Intersecting Conformance, Irrecoverability and
Removeability,
> > and more. Should be out mid/late 2008.
> >
> >
> > * Pantheios
> >     As you may know, this is, IMO, the ultimate logging API library,
> > affording the user complete robustness (incl. 100% type-safety) and
> > unmatchable performance characteristics. It is designed to work above
any
> > other logging libraries, so you can have maximal performance combined
with
> > the configurability of, say, log4cxx.
> >     Pantheios has been in beta for over a year, but is now very close to
a
> > final 1.0 release. The remaining tasks are:
> >         1. put in xTests (see below) unit and component tests into the
build
> >         2. implement buffering and file-rolling for be.file
> >         3. website rework
> >         4. project files for VC++ 2003/5/8 & Borland Turbo C++
> >         5. update documentation
> >         6. compatibility with VC++ "safe" compilation
> >     I've also been involved with some commercial customisations of
Pantheios
> > for companies here in Aus and in the US, who believe that Pantheios
offers
> > them a significant competitive advantage. Who am I to disagree? <g> I
can't
> > comment on what I've been doing, or for whom I've been doing it, but I
am,
> > of course, always available for such work for any clients that believe
their
> > logging requirements are such that they have to eek out the maximum
value of
> > every last processor cycle in the software.
> >
> >
> > * FastFormat
> >     FastFormat uses a similar technology to Pantheios to afford total
> > type-safety and unbeatable performance when formatting text statements.
It
> > fully supports I18N/L10N by the use of numbered arguments; arguments
used
> > more than once are converted only once. It supports arbitrary
destinations
> > of the formatted result by the mechanism of "sinks". There are several
stock
> > sink types, including strings, string arrays, files, speech (currently
> > Windows only).
> >     FF is almost ready to go - I've built the makefile template and
proved
> > it on Linux/Mac/Windows with several compilers - and should be out next week. Am just working through some other stuff first, and then plan to
write
> > the FF chapter for "Monolith" at the time that I release it (and submit
> > article(s) on it to mags).
> >     Although my publicity machine has never been the best, I believe
that
> > there should be no reason why FF should not become the de facto standard
for
> > C++ formatting/output, as it addresses all the problems of C's streams, C++'s IOStreams, and the other open-source "modern" formatting
libraries.
> > Time will tell ... ;-)
> >
> >
> > * flecxx
> >
> >     One of the more simplistic messages in "Monolith" is that good
libraries
> > should afford one the ability to communicate with them in the types with which you're writing your application code, rather than the lower-level-of-abstraction types in which their interfaces are
expressed.
> > flecxx, to be released in Jan/Feb, is a 100% header-only adaptation
layer
> > library that wraps standard and popular 3rd-party libraries and removes
the
> > need to sully your beautiful code with all those .get(), .c_str(),
> > .GetSafeHWnd(), etc. calls.
> >
> >
> > * xTests
> >     After releasing all these libraries, it's about time I put out the
> > testing framework I've been using these long years. This is particularly
so
> > because the next release of Pantheios, and every release of FastFormat
and
> > flecxx, will come bundled with the testing framework. Open-sourced and rebadged as xTests, it'll be available for anyone to use with any
projects
> > sometime soon.
> >     xTests is deliberately not all that sophisticated, so it's not going
to
> > be a replacement for any xUnit-like library you're using. But it's
simple,
> > and has minimal coupling, and does the job.
> >
> >
> > * xContract
> >     Testing's important, but it's only half the software quality
assurance
> > picture.Contracts are the other. I'm going to put my money where my
mouth is
> > this year, and reify all my wild theories about Irrecoverability in the
form
> > of the xContracts library. We'll start with C/C++, then Ruby, and then
see
> > where life takes us after that.
> >
> >
> >
> > That's a brief summary of my non-commercial effort over the coming year.
All
> > those people who've been understandably frustrated about the lack of doc/support with STLSoft should, by the end of '08, have all their
issues
> > dequalmed.
> >
> > A happy new year to all!
> >
> > :-)
> >
> > Matt
> >
> >
> >

Hi Mathew,

Beforehand happy holidays!

Without any doubt I have to agree with Mr. Adi  Shavit, I will be honest that the thing that amazes me the most is the level of "production" you present and sustain (synesis + book + stlsoft + personal life + ... ) my daily job alone "sucks" the life out of me.

Anyway, could you give some detail regarding STLSoft+, since you detailed all the other stuff.

Happy New Year
Cláudio Albuquerque


"Matthew Wilson" <matthew@hat.stlsoft.dot.org> wrote in message news:fks1rp$1uu7$1@digitalmars.com...
> First, I'd like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday.
>
>
> And I'd also like to let you know what you're in for from me with STLSoft (and related projects) in 2008. So, in no particular order:
>
> * STLSoft:
>    1. Website. This is finally going to get the professional treatment. It
> will have a redesign, be moved to its own server (so stlsoft.org is no
> longer synesis.com.au/software/stlsoft), have a blog, have a place for
> publishing small (or even large) articles, have tutorials, and a whole lot
> more. This should happen in Jan/Feb. Later in the year I may also provide
> commercial support facilities.
>    2. Documentation. The first phase will be to get the STLSoft
> distribution scripts updated and to start re-publishing the Doxygen
> generated docs. This should occur in Jan. In a couple more months' time,
> once the site re-org is done, I will be providing better and more
> extensive
> documentation, in concert with some other "senior" STLSoft fellows. More
> on
> this at another time ...
>    3. 1.10 will be released soon. It will contain several new components -
> including an uber-efficient properties-file class - and maybe even a
> couple
> of new projects (of which more later). One important thing is for me to
> address all the remaining items on the NG: there are currently 62 marked
> unread (i.e. left to process), some of which go back to 2005! Finally,
> there'll be a first tranch of some much needed rationalisation of
> internal/support files/classes/namespaces, to simplify and reduce
> compilation times.
>    4. Later in the year I plan, if I get time, to release STLSoft+, which
> is a commercial enhancement to STLSoft, supplementing various STLSoft
> sub-projects with substantial services.
>    5. Support for other new libraries, including xContract (see below)
>
>
> * Synesis:
>    1. The website's going to get a radical reworking (and reduction), to
> reflect the commercial emphases of the last few years: development process
> consulting, open-source customisation, network-related custom product
> development.
>    2. All the to-be-released soon (some as back as 2004!) will be removed.
>    3. The system tools will be updated (for Linux & Windows, 32 & 64-bit)
>    4. Some articles and/or blogs
>
>
> * "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise"
> (http://breakingupthemonolith.com/)
>    This is my next book, and is about how to get everything you want from
> C++ without compromise, particularly between efficiency, expressiveness
> and
> robustness. It discusses the technologies (in particular the Shims concept
> and the Type Tunnel pattern) behind Pantheios and FastFormat, as well as
> other techniques for breaking up monolithic software, maximising design
> values, and so on. I've been writing it on and off for the last 15 months,
> but am about to put in a solid 10 days on it, which should get me to the
> 50%
> completion mark. The rest will be done over weekends over the following 3
> months. For anyone that's followed Imperfect C++ & Extended STL (vol 1)
> and/or the progression of the STLSoft, Pantheios, recls, FastFormat,
> flecxx,
> VOLE etc. libraries, this is the book that explains it all, including the
> Shims concept, the Handle::Ref+Wrapper and Type Tunnel patterns, the
> principles of Intersecting Conformance, Irrecoverability and
> Removeability,
> and more. Should be out mid/late 2008.
>
>
> * Pantheios
>    As you may know, this is, IMO, the ultimate logging API library,
> affording the user complete robustness (incl. 100% type-safety) and
> unmatchable performance characteristics. It is designed to work above any
> other logging libraries, so you can have maximal performance combined with
> the configurability of, say, log4cxx.
>    Pantheios has been in beta for over a year, but is now very close to a
> final 1.0 release. The remaining tasks are:
>        1. put in xTests (see below) unit and component tests into the
> build
>        2. implement buffering and file-rolling for be.file
>        3. website rework
>        4. project files for VC++ 2003/5/8 & Borland Turbo C++
>        5. update documentation
>        6. compatibility with VC++ "safe" compilation
>    I've also been involved with some commercial customisations of
> Pantheios
> for companies here in Aus and in the US, who believe that Pantheios offers
> them a significant competitive advantage. Who am I to disagree? <g> I
> can't
> comment on what I've been doing, or for whom I've been doing it, but I am,
> of course, always available for such work for any clients that believe
> their
> logging requirements are such that they have to eek out the maximum value
> of
> every last processor cycle in the software.
>
>
> * FastFormat
>    FastFormat uses a similar technology to Pantheios to afford total
> type-safety and unbeatable performance when formatting text statements. It
> fully supports I18N/L10N by the use of numbered arguments; arguments used
> more than once are converted only once. It supports arbitrary destinations
> of the formatted result by the mechanism of "sinks". There are several
> stock
> sink types, including strings, string arrays, files, speech (currently
> Windows only).
>    FF is almost ready to go - I've built the makefile template and proved
> it on Linux/Mac/Windows with several compilers - and should be out next
> week. Am just working through some other stuff first, and then plan to
> write
> the FF chapter for "Monolith" at the time that I release it (and submit
> article(s) on it to mags).
>    Although my publicity machine has never been the best, I believe that
> there should be no reason why FF should not become the de facto standard
> for
> C++ formatting/output, as it addresses all the problems of C's streams,
> C++'s IOStreams, and the other open-source "modern" formatting libraries.
> Time will tell ... ;-)
>
>
> * flecxx
>
>    One of the more simplistic messages in "Monolith" is that good
> libraries
> should afford one the ability to communicate with them in the types with
> which you're writing your application code, rather than the
> lower-level-of-abstraction types in which their interfaces are expressed.
> flecxx, to be released in Jan/Feb, is a 100% header-only adaptation layer
> library that wraps standard and popular 3rd-party libraries and removes
> the
> need to sully your beautiful code with all those .get(), .c_str(),
> .GetSafeHWnd(), etc. calls.
>
>
> * xTests
>    After releasing all these libraries, it's about time I put out the
> testing framework I've been using these long years. This is particularly
> so
> because the next release of Pantheios, and every release of FastFormat and
> flecxx, will come bundled with the testing framework. Open-sourced and
> rebadged as xTests, it'll be available for anyone to use with any projects
> sometime soon.
>    xTests is deliberately not all that sophisticated, so it's not going to
> be a replacement for any xUnit-like library you're using. But it's simple,
> and has minimal coupling, and does the job.
>
>
> * xContract
>    Testing's important, but it's only half the software quality assurance
> picture.Contracts are the other. I'm going to put my money where my mouth
> is
> this year, and reify all my wild theories about Irrecoverability in the
> form
> of the xContracts library. We'll start with C/C++, then Ruby, and then see
> where life takes us after that.
>
>
>
> That's a brief summary of my non-commercial effort over the coming year.
> All
> those people who've been understandably frustrated about the lack of
> doc/support with STLSoft should, by the end of '08, have all their issues
> dequalmed.
>
> A happy new year to all!
>
> :-)
>
> Matt
>
> 

A little late, but...

Happy holidays!

And congratulations, as others have said, on being an example to follow ;)


Best of luck for this year!
Pablo


Matthew Wilson wrote:
> First, I'd like to wish everyone a healthy and happy holiday.
> 
> 
> And I'd also like to let you know what you're in for from me with STLSoft
> (and related projects) in 2008. So, in no particular order:
> 
> * STLSoft:
>     1. Website. This is finally going to get the professional treatment. It
> will have a redesign, be moved to its own server (so stlsoft.org is no
> longer synesis.com.au/software/stlsoft), have a blog, have a place for
> publishing small (or even large) articles, have tutorials, and a whole lot
> more. This should happen in Jan/Feb. Later in the year I may also provide
> commercial support facilities.
>     2. Documentation. The first phase will be to get the STLSoft
> distribution scripts updated and to start re-publishing the Doxygen
> generated docs. This should occur in Jan. In a couple more months' time,
> once the site re-org is done, I will be providing better and more extensive
> documentation, in concert with some other "senior" STLSoft fellows. More on
> this at another time ...
>     3. 1.10 will be released soon. It will contain several new components -
> including an uber-efficient properties-file class - and maybe even a couple
> of new projects (of which more later). One important thing is for me to
> address all the remaining items on the NG: there are currently 62 marked
> unread (i.e. left to process), some of which go back to 2005! Finally,
> there'll be a first tranch of some much needed rationalisation of
> internal/support files/classes/namespaces, to simplify and reduce
> compilation times.
>     4. Later in the year I plan, if I get time, to release STLSoft+, which
> is a commercial enhancement to STLSoft, supplementing various STLSoft
> sub-projects with substantial services.
>     5. Support for other new libraries, including xContract (see below)
> 
> 
> * Synesis:
>     1. The website's going to get a radical reworking (and reduction), to
> reflect the commercial emphases of the last few years: development process
> consulting, open-source customisation, network-related custom product
> development.
>     2. All the to-be-released soon (some as back as 2004!) will be removed.
>     3. The system tools will be updated (for Linux & Windows, 32 & 64-bit)
>     4. Some articles and/or blogs
> 
> 
> * "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise"
> (http://breakingupthemonolith.com/)
>     This is my next book, and is about how to get everything you want from
> C++ without compromise, particularly between efficiency, expressiveness and
> robustness. It discusses the technologies (in particular the Shims concept
> and the Type Tunnel pattern) behind Pantheios and FastFormat, as well as
> other techniques for breaking up monolithic software, maximising design
> values, and so on. I've been writing it on and off for the last 15 months,
> but am about to put in a solid 10 days on it, which should get me to the 50%
> completion mark. The rest will be done over weekends over the following 3
> months. For anyone that's followed Imperfect C++ & Extended STL (vol 1)
> and/or the progression of the STLSoft, Pantheios, recls, FastFormat, flecxx,
> VOLE etc. libraries, this is the book that explains it all, including the
> Shims concept, the Handle::Ref+Wrapper and Type Tunnel patterns, the
> principles of Intersecting Conformance, Irrecoverability and Removeability,
> and more. Should be out mid/late 2008.
> 
> 
> * Pantheios
>     As you may know, this is, IMO, the ultimate logging API library,
> affording the user complete robustness (incl. 100% type-safety) and
> unmatchable performance characteristics. It is designed to work above any
> other logging libraries, so you can have maximal performance combined with
> the configurability of, say, log4cxx.
>     Pantheios has been in beta for over a year, but is now very close to a
> final 1.0 release. The remaining tasks are:
>         1. put in xTests (see below) unit and component tests into the build
>         2. implement buffering and file-rolling for be.file
>         3. website rework
>         4. project files for VC++ 2003/5/8 & Borland Turbo C++
>         5. update documentation
>         6. compatibility with VC++ "safe" compilation
>     I've also been involved with some commercial customisations of Pantheios
> for companies here in Aus and in the US, who believe that Pantheios offers
> them a significant competitive advantage. Who am I to disagree? <g> I can't
> comment on what I've been doing, or for whom I've been doing it, but I am,
> of course, always available for such work for any clients that believe their
> logging requirements are such that they have to eek out the maximum value of
> every last processor cycle in the software.
> 
> 
> * FastFormat
>     FastFormat uses a similar technology to Pantheios to afford total
> type-safety and unbeatable performance when formatting text statements. It
> fully supports I18N/L10N by the use of numbered arguments; arguments used
> more than once are converted only once. It supports arbitrary destinations
> of the formatted result by the mechanism of "sinks". There are several stock
> sink types, including strings, string arrays, files, speech (currently
> Windows only).
>     FF is almost ready to go - I've built the makefile template and proved
> it on Linux/Mac/Windows with several compilers - and should be out next
> week. Am just working through some other stuff first, and then plan to write
> the FF chapter for "Monolith" at the time that I release it (and submit
> article(s) on it to mags).
>     Although my publicity machine has never been the best, I believe that
> there should be no reason why FF should not become the de facto standard for
> C++ formatting/output, as it addresses all the problems of C's streams,
> C++'s IOStreams, and the other open-source "modern" formatting libraries.
> Time will tell ... ;-)
> 
> 
> * flecxx
> 
>     One of the more simplistic messages in "Monolith" is that good libraries
> should afford one the ability to communicate with them in the types with
> which you're writing your application code, rather than the
> lower-level-of-abstraction types in which their interfaces are expressed.
> flecxx, to be released in Jan/Feb, is a 100% header-only adaptation layer
> library that wraps standard and popular 3rd-party libraries and removes the
> need to sully your beautiful code with all those .get(), .c_str(),
> .GetSafeHWnd(), etc. calls.
> 
> 
> * xTests
>     After releasing all these libraries, it's about time I put out the
> testing framework I've been using these long years. This is particularly so
> because the next release of Pantheios, and every release of FastFormat and
> flecxx, will come bundled with the testing framework. Open-sourced and
> rebadged as xTests, it'll be available for anyone to use with any projects
> sometime soon.
>     xTests is deliberately not all that sophisticated, so it's not going to
> be a replacement for any xUnit-like library you're using. But it's simple,
> and has minimal coupling, and does the job.
> 
> 
> * xContract
>     Testing's important, but it's only half the software quality assurance
> picture.Contracts are the other. I'm going to put my money where my mouth is
> this year, and reify all my wild theories about Irrecoverability in the form
> of the xContracts library. We'll start with C/C++, then Ruby, and then see
> where life takes us after that.
> 
> 
> 
> That's a brief summary of my non-commercial effort over the coming year. All
> those people who've been understandably frustrated about the lack of
> doc/support with STLSoft should, by the end of '08, have all their issues
> dequalmed.
> 
> A happy new year to all!
> 
> :-)
> 
> Matt

"Cláudio Albuquerque" <cláudio@nowhere.com> wrote in message news:fl6sq2$218f$1@digitalmars.com...
> Hi Mathew,
>
> Beforehand happy holidays!
>
> Without any doubt I have to agree with Mr. Adi  Shavit, I will be honest that the thing that amazes me the most is the level of "production" you present and sustain (synesis + book + stlsoft + personal life + ... ) my daily job alone "sucks" the life out of me.

Thanks, mate. Although I have to say I feel like I'm walking through treacle most of the time. (For example, FastFormat has been
largely complete for more than a year, but getting out the door has been the longest PITA. Soon, now, though <g>)

> Anyway, could you give some detail regarding STLSoft+, since you detailed all the other stuff.

This'll be a non-free (i.e. commercial offering, still likely 100% header-only, though). Don't expect to see this happening until Q4
08, however.