Team Eiffel

Right-click context-sensitive menus are being added to EiffelStudio. "At last!", I hear from the back rows.

This won't replace the current right-click pick-and-drop mechanism. The first entry on each context menu will be "Pick", and the developers are looking at other ideas, such as auto-pick if the right button is held down for more than a certain (short) time.

The developers are asking for feedback, which you can provide at the EiffelStudio wiki.

Labels: eiffelstudio

Emmanuel ("Manu") Stapf has confirmed on the ES-devel mailing list that EiffelStudio will eventually replace its "base" library classes with the corresponding classes from the open source FreeElks project, which is administered by Emmanuel Stapf and Eric Bezault.

At first glance this seems rather odd. FreeElks was established (with ISE's blessing and initial donation of code) to provide a free implementation of EiffelBase - but this was before EiffelStudio itself became open source.

So why the switch? There's one key difference between the FreeElks and EiffelStudio libraries - FreeElks will not have any dependencies on the EiffelStudio runtime. This will make it possible to use the same core kernel library library - with bug-for-bug compatibility - for both EiffelStudio and Eric's Gobo Eiffel Compiler.

Manu advises that the switch will take place "when elks compiles". Although freeelks is under active development, it may be a while yet before it's a "drop-in replacement".

Labels: eiffelstudio

EiffelStudio 5.7 has been selected as one of the finalists in this year's Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards in the category of Development Environments.

Other contenders in the category are IntelliJ IDEA (from JetBrains), IronPython (from Microsoft), Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express, Microsoft XNA Framework, NetBeans IDE (from Sun Microsystems) and Wolfram Workbench (from Wolfram Research).

The winner will be announced in March at SD West 2007 in Santa Clara.

EiffelStudio was also a finalist back in 2002, in the category of Languages and Development Environments.

Labels: eiffelstudio

Emmanuel Stapf has announced the open-sourcing of the Eweasel regression testing tool for the ISE Eiffel compiler. It is now hosted at Origo together with EiffelStudio. Emmanuel writes:

We have been using eweasel for quite some time now and the rule at Eiffel Software is that when you change something in the compiler, you have to run all the tests to ensure that no regression occurs.

Any one who wants to modify the compiler, can now run the tests to ensure he is not breaking anything else.

The tests are evolving and we are adding a test each time we found a compiler bug. So if you find one, it would speed up its resolution by providing the corresponding eweasel test as part of the bug report.

The history of the tool is told at the Eweasel wiki page:

EiffelWeasel, also known as eweasel, is a tool originally written by David Hollenberg from MOSIS (a division of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute) in the early 1990's when the first Eiffel 3 compiler was released.

The tool's goal was to ensure conformance of the ISE Eiffel compiler to the recently published specification and to detect any unforeseen regression from version to version. In 2006, USC agreed to open-source EiffelWeasel and it is now hosted as part of the EiffelStudio project repository.

Labels: eiffelstudio

On the comp.lang.eiffel newsgroup, Colin Adams asked:

Does anyone know of a list of syntax changes between OOSC2 and ECMA Eiffel (or EiffelStudio 5.7)?

I want to insert sheets of paper into the front of copies of OOSC2 so Eiffel learners don't get confused.

Here are two pages related to this question:

• Differences between EiffelStudio and ECMA Eiffel
• Differences between ETL Eiffel and EiffelStudio

Also of interest is the task list showing progress towards implementing ECMA Eiffel in EiffelStudio.

See also the section "Language Changes from the Previous Edition" in Bertrand Meyer's draft of the book "Standard Eiffel" (which will supersede ETL).

Labels: eiffelstudio

EiffelStudio 5.7.64493 (changelog) has been released as "EiffelStudio 5.7 Final".

Downloads are available for FreeBSD x86, Irix MIPS, Linux (PPC, Sparc, x86 32 bit, x86 64 bit), OpenBSD x86, Solaris (Sparc and x86, 32 and 64 bit), Windows (32 and 64 bit). There is also a PorterPackage that can be used to bootstrap EiffelStudio on other platforms.

Downloads will also be available from eiffel.com in a few days.

Labels: eiffelstudio