Project info for ZooLib

Created 6 Dec 2000 at 01:30 UTC by goingware, last modified 28 Jun 2002 at 09:18 UTC by goingware.

Homepage: http://zoolib.sourceforge.net/

Freshmeat page: http://freshmeat.net/projects/zoolib/

Notes:

ZooLib allows one to write a single set of C++ sources which can be compiled into native executables for Mac OS, Windows, BeOS, or POSIX-compliant systems that use the X Window system (such as Linux). Zoolib provides a GUI toolkit with a uniquely flexible layout system. It also provides a single-file database format, TCP networking, and extensive debugging support. ZooLib applications are multithreaded. ZooLib requires only minimal support from the underlying OS and platform GUI layer, and thus could be ported to a completely new platform without too much difficulty.

Documentation

A very early draft of a tutorial for ZooLib is available in The ZooLib Cookbook. It is written in DocBook XML; the link here is to the HTML version that you can read in your browser.

News - June 28, 2002

The last release of ZooLib was a small fix to its initial Open Source release, and that was back in October 2000. It's been a long time since any releases have been made, and many people have gotten the impression that the project is inactive.

One other reason for that impression is that for a long time, ZooLib was not available for anonymous CVS. It was in CVS, but on a private server at Learning in Motion. It wasn't moved to public CVS at sourceforge in part because LIM would have to change their build process and in part because the original CVS contained a bunch of code that they didn't release as open source (such as some proprietary code that LIM had licensed and modified but didn't have the right to redistribute).

However, ZooLib is finally in SourceForge CVS. Here are instructions for accessing the CVS archive. ZooLib has been anything but inactive, in fact a tremendous amount of very good work has been done on it, so that at this point I would recommend that serious users retrieve the code from CVS rather than grabbing the old release tarball.

ZooLib's author ag agreed with me recently that we should issue a proper release soon. However, there are a few loose ends to tie up, like ensuring that it builds cleanly and works correctly on all supported platforms and with all supported compilers, and I would like to do more work on The ZooLib Cookbook. Also, Andy and I are both on long trips away from home so we aren't able to devote much attention to getting the release ready until we return. But a release should happen within a month or two.

Among the work that has been done are:

Extensive architectural improvements to the bitmapped graphics buffer class ZDCPixMap (a wrapper around platform-specific bitmaps like Mac OS GWorlds)
A new resource architecture which works identically on all platforms, allows for resource overrides which can ease localization by end-users, and supports Linux
Greatly improved support for Mac OS Carbon targets. You can still build Classic targets, and I think even 68000 support still works - so you can run ZooLib applications on any Mac, 68000 or PowerPC, from System 7.5 or so up through native execution on Mac OS X
Support for Microsoft Visual C++
A new fault-tolerant database file format, robust against power failures and crashes. It is similar in concept to a journaled filesystem, but instead of a traditonal journal it uses the Phase Tree Algorithm, which is also used by the Tux2 Failsafe Filesystem. I believe that Phase Tree was invented by Daniel Phillips.
Support for current versions of MetroWorks CodeWarrior for Windows and Mac OS
and lots of little things I can't remember right now!

-- goingware

License: MIT

This project has the following developers:

goingware is a Developer.
MichaelCrawford is a Developer.