Wednesday, 10 June 2005 Announcement ============ The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are pleased to announce the beta release of Babel, version 0.10.4. What's New ========== The following features have been added, or completed, in this release: + Fixed roundup issues: 94, 137, 138, 139, 143, 145, 144, 146, 147, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 172, 180 + Significant usability improvements including: o ability to generate multiple language bindings in a single run o generate babel.make.package to help people building Babel code o generate babel.make.depends to help people building Babel code o New Babel documentation capability --text=html generates documentation similar to Javadoc for .sidl files. o Use consistent names for libraries and babel-config. + Enable Babel extensions to add command line flags + Improved Babel's configuration and build + Support latest AIX compilers and MPI compiler wrapper scripts + Improve Mac OSX configure/build/testing + Support JDK 1.4 or 1.5 + Pregenerate sidl stubs for all supported languages. + Add assertion and hook regression tests. + Use --with-chasm[=prefix] instead of --enable-chasm now + Replaced long assertion violations with shorter names. (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, Java, 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 (or later) to be installed before Babel. Chasm 1.2.0 is required to use the gfortran F90 compiler. 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 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 https://www.cca-forum.org/bugs/babel/, or send email to babel-bugs@cca-forum.org. $Id: ANNOUNCE-0.10.4.txt 1172 2005-06-14 17:01:54Z epperly $