Although not always visible due to the infrequent release of new framework packages, there has been a lot of progress in the past few months. More than 100 community members(!) have joined the effort by singing the CLA, and are contributing via proposals, comments, patches, code contributions or documentation improvements.

Now the Summer is over and everyone is back at work, we feel it's the right time to finish planning the 1.0 release. We believe that in order to make a successfull release and get closure on the various aspects, it makes most sense to break up the framework into a limited number of subject areas and form project teams around these areas instead of components.

The following is a list of such areas and the components we believe we should focus on for 1.0. As you can see, a large amount of the work has already been done, but we now have to focus on getting closure on them and tying up loose ends.

Some of the components they've listed fall under the categories of:

• Web & Web Services
• MVC & related
• Authentication & authorization
• Databases
• Documentation & translation

There is also a high-level look at what version 0.2 of the framework will contain and a return to the "post often" methodology they had before.

The new release of Image_3D (0.4-alpha) is out. It was quite some time ago, Richard Davey wrote his great introduction into Image_3D. He asked for some different types of lights, I didn't thought of, when I released Image_3D first. This needed a minor change in the API you use to create lights, but offers some great improvements. See changelog for details.

Some of the other additions mentioned include, as mentioned, the ability to create different types of lights (light, ambient, point, and spotlight) and the inclusion of an object that allows for the creation of bezier areas from an array of points.]]> Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:34:12 -0600