September 2008

It's been a very busy month here. The best news is that we've been making some progress on the Linux port of FOST.3™. We're working from the bottom up and that means tacking string & Unicode handling, exceptions, threading and testing first. Because of the way this needs to work it also means handling the settings database which requires variants and JSON.

We've switched to Boost.Build for this and have that working (more or less). I'm still in two minds about how good Boost.Build really is. The good bits are great, but the bad bits just make you want to forget the whole thing and use a batch file for your build process instead. There's always at least one step backwards before you can ever move forwards.

I don't know if we're going to be able to get any of the FOST.3™ stuff released in October or not, but I hope so.

We've also been getting deeper into Django. FOST.3™ does quite a few things differently to Django — especially in how it handles functionality that falls under the umbrella of the Django admin module. What we've been doing is to take those ideas and extend the admin module so that it can be used in ways that more closely resemble the way that FOST.3™ does things.

Added to that we also have some interesting REST stuff that we want to put out for Django too — we're using it to connect web sites in ASP.NET with Django. We can use Django forms and form processing from within the ASP.NET pages which is kind of cool and provides us with a method for adding new Django based functionality into existing ASP.NET web sites.