WEDNESDAY, 29 October 2003

Announcement
============
  The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory <components@llnl.gov> are pleased to
announce the beta release of Babel, version 0.8.8.

What's New
==========
  The following features have been added, or completed, in
this release:

  + First official release with native F90 array pointer support
    with array descrptor support provided by CHASM 1.0.1.
  + Improved behavior with version control systems.
  + array support increased from 4-D to 7-D
  + added create1dInit(int32_t len, T* data) to create a 1-D array an
    initialize it with copies of data.
  + refactored C++ array implementation 
    + changed implementation of get/set for arrays of fixed size types
      (i.e., not strings or objects) to be faster and more easily inlined.
    + added operator[] to be eqivalent to get(i) (for use in 1-D only)
    + added STL input iterators to C++ arrays (for use in 1-D only)
  + added info about --vpath option to --help output
  + added option --exclude-external (short version -E) which causes code to
    be generated only for the symbols specified on the command line (no
    code is generated for symbols on which the user symbols depend)
  + added option --language-subdir (short version -l) which causes 
    all generated files to be stored in a language-dependent subdirectory;
    if the --generate-subdirs option is also used, the language directory 
    will be at the bottom of the hierarchy.
  + added option --hide-glue (short version -u) which can be used to  
    generate all non-impl files in a glue/ subdirectory.
  + modified generated file names to use only short symbol names 
    when --generate-subdirs and --exclude-external are used together 
    (only for C++ and Fortran)

(Also refer to the CHANGES file for more details.)

What Babel Is
=============
  Babel is designed to address problems of language 
interoperability, particularly in scientific/engineering
applications.  At the simplest level, Babel generates glue 
code so that libraries written in one programming language 
are callable from other programming languages.  Babel
generates this glue code from an interface description
written in SIDL, our Scientific Interface Definition 
Language.  Babel supports full Object-Oriented features
and exception handling even in non-OO languages such as C
or Fortran77.


Supported Languages
===================
  Babel currently supports calling libraries written in 
C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, or Python from drivers written 
in either C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, Python or Java.  (Python 
support also requires the Numerical Python set of extensions at 
http://numpy.sourceforge.net/ ). Fortran90 requires CHASM 1.0.1
to be installed before Babel.


Supported Platforms
===================
Linux 
Solaris
AIX (except Python)

(More expected in next few months.)

Broken Platforms (hopefully to be resurrected)
==============================================
Cygwin


Caveat
======
  Babel is research in progress.  This is a beta release 
looking for more friendly users and now some power users.  
Babel has been used on a few real projects now, there
are still too few examples, but the documentation is 
improving.


Availability
============
  The software is available for free download at
	http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/components


User Resources
==============
  Two email lists have been set up for the Babel community:

	babel-users@llnl.gov  (unmoderated discussions)
	babel-announce@llnl.gov (announcements only)

To subscribe to one or both of these email lists, send
email to <majordomo@lists.llnl.gov> with the text
"subscribe babel-announce", "subscribe babel-users",
or both (one per line).  


Contacting the Authors
======================
  If you have any questions or concerns with the installation 
process or usage of Babel, feel free to contact the project team 
at components@llnl.gov.  To report bugs or suggest feature 
enhancements, please submit a report in the bug database at 
http://www-casc.llnl.gov/bugs/ .

$Id: ANNOUNCE,v 1.41.2.1 2003/10/28 21:57:50 epperly Exp $
