Fost 4 release 4.09.06.35263 now out

There were certainly times over the past few days that I wasn't sure if we were going to get anything useful released to stable branches in our Subversion repository for our planned release of Fost 4 today.

The intention is now to work towards a release every three months (on the 21st of March, June, September and December). We may also put out additional service releases on the 21st of other months.

The current status page shows a number of useful aspects of the libraries that are stable right now¹ [1There isn't much documentation online yet for these, but that should change over the course of the next few weeks.]. There's a load of good stuff in there, but the really interesting bits are those that are not yet stable — especially the new database abstractions that are going in to the O/RM.

The new O/RM layer isn't really an object/relational mapping at all, it's more than that. The database drivers abstract things at a much higher level which means that we can support non-relational databases as well. There's a JSON database included that is fully transactional and works with the same object persistence database driver API that the Postgres and Microsoft SQL drivers implement.

And as we're eating our own dogfood this web site and several others are running on a Fost 4 base, although most of the top part of the web stack is still FOST.3™. As well as making extensive use of the stable parts of the stack, the web sites are also using much of the more experimental code, for example the new database drivers.