Wednesday, 21 August 2002

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 0.7.4.

************************* NOTICE *************************
Changes related to support for Python 2.2 have resulted in 
the requirement that distutils be installed to use the 
Python bindings.  Python 1.6 and higher have distutils
built in; however, we have only used Python 2.0 and higher.
************************* NOTICE *************************


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

  + Fix build problem in 0.7.2 release
  + Improve support for arrays of long in Python
  + Release under LGPL with LLNL preamble (required by DOE contract)

  From 0.7.2
  + Added --exclude=<regex> command line option to exclude
    code generation for all symbols matching the regular 
    expression (see bugs #369 and #425 for more)
  + Made C++ array set method argument ordering consistent 
    with C, F77, etc.
  + Completed support for overloaded functions based on
    an exact match of the arguments
  + Added Python Distutils to support Python 2.2
  + Removed support for Python builds using Makefile.pre.in 
    approach
  + Closed 20 bug reports (see below for list)

(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++, F77, or Python from drivers written in either C, 
C++, F77, Python or Java.  (Python support also requires 
the Numerical Python set of extensions at 
http://numpy.sourceforge.net)


Supported Platforms
===================
Linux 
Solaris
Cygwin

(More expected in next few months.)


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-0.7.4.txt 687 2002-08-21 15:04:12Z epperly $