News

Étoilé intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. Flexibility and modularity on both User Interface and code level should allow us to scale from handheld to desktop environments.

0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included. More will be added during the 0.4.x release series, leading to a user-focussed 0.5 release next year.

Highlights

CoreObject is a framework for describing and organizing model objects. It supports automatic persistence and versioning by recording messages sent to objects. It offers a flexible versioning scheme where both individual objects and their entire object graph can be versioned separately. The built-in object model is a generalization of the property model used by the AddressBook framework. Foreign model objects can be also integrated by wrapping them with a special proxy. CoreObject uses the EtoileSerialize framework which, in many cases, allows objects and messages to be automatically serialized with no extra code being written.

LanguageKit is a compiler kit built on top of LLVM for creating dynamic language implementations using an Objective-C runtime for the object model. This is used by SmalltalkKit, implementing Étoilé's Pragmatic Smalltalk, a Smalltalk JIT compiler which generates code binary-compatible with Objective-C, allowing classes to be written in a mixture of Smalltalk and Objective-C.

EtoileFoundation is the core framework for all Étoilé projects, providing numerous convenience methods on top of the OpenStep foundation and significantly better support for reflection. This includes EtoileThread which allows objects to transparently be run in a separate thread. It also includes a number of extensions to the Objective-C object model, allowing traits and mixins. This framework is used by most of the rest of Étoilé and provides a number of core functions, such as UUID and XML handling.

EtoileUI is also available as an early preview release and should not be considered stable. EtoileUI is a high-level, object-oriented, user interface toolkit that provides a uniform tree representation for graphical objects on top of the AppKit. All User Interface concerns such as layouts, event handlers, styles, model objects etc. will be implemented as pluggable aspects. It also shares the same interfaces as other CoreObject systems. The combination of these three key features makes possible to inspect and reshape both User Interface and model objects at runtime through direct manipulation. It comes with a library of layouts where each one encapsulates a custom and pluggable visual presentation.

Other frameworks, such as LuceneKit, providing full-text indexing and searching, and OgreKit, a powerful regular expression framework are also included. UnitKit is a simple and flexible unit testing framework used by much of Étoilé. A new addition is MediaKit, a framework used to provide support for sound playback and recording and, in future, video. SystemConfig has received a number of improvements since our last release, including support for modifying basic X11 keyboard settings and monitoring the battery level.

Several applications are part of this release, such as Mélodie, a music jukebox using CoreObject for the music library and MediaKit for playback. Étoilé applications which use ScriptKit are scriptable from outside using Objective-C or Smalltalk. This is used by the hot corners and gesture recognition tool to run arbitrary commands in response to corner activations or mouse gestures, and by ScriptServices which allows arbitrary shell or Smalltalk scripts to be invoked on the current selection from any GNUstep or Étoilé application.

Screenshots

Étoilé in the Dictionary About and Vindaloo PDF reader

Availability

Étoilé 0.4.0 is currently available in code source form only and may be downloaded at http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile-0.4.0.tar.gz It may also be obtained from Subversion with the following command:

svn co svn://svn.gna.org/svn/etoile/tags/Etoile-0.4.0

If you wish to use the latest stable release, then you can download http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile-0.4.0-svn.tar.gz before running svn up to seed your source tree.

More Information

Visit our website: http://www.etoileos.com/ and blog: http://etoileos.com/news/ Or subscribe to our mailing lists: https://gna.org/mail/?group=etoile Or join our SILC channel: silc://silc.etoileos.com/Etoile