Archive for October, 2007

sIFR 3: Updates

posted October 11th, 2007, 40 comments, tagged

Life’s busy as usual, but it’s been too long since I last wrote about sIFR. Using the wonders of modern technology I’ve been writing and posting this from a train speeding towards Rotterdam, where I’ll be dropping by at the Xopus booth at ECM Plaza. Afterwards I’ll be going to a place-supposedly-unknown on a company holiday with Q42 and Xopus. (How cool is that, eh?! We’re hiring, too) So anyway, that’s just to tell you that I won’t be responding to questions in the next few days.

I’ve been working on sIFR on and off, so it’s moving slowly. That’s not to say nothing is happening, though! Since the last post there have been 40 new revisions. As usual they can be found through the nightlies. I’ve also created a RSS feed for the nightlies. This is the best way to stay up to date on development.

Which Version to Use?

An oft-asked question is which revision should be used. Since sIFR is under constant development, it’s always a good idea to use the most recent nightly. Using the feed you can keep an eye on bug fixes. sIFR is beta software. Even though I would totally recommend it over version 2, it is your responsibility to stay somewhat up to date and not miss out on important bug fixes. As usual, installing a new version means replacing the JavaScript file and re-exporting the Flash movie. It’s also a good idea to look at the changes between the revision you’re currently using and the new revision, you may have to change some other things.

Roadmap

So what’s the plan going forward? I intend to stabilize the current code base and release a second beta. After the beta is out I’ll be improving the speed of the code and writing documentation – this will likely result in some refactoring. Then one or two release candidates and we’re good to go for 3.0. I’m not giving dates because I honestly have no idea when this’ll be happening. You can view a list of known issues.

Documentation

The documentation is running behind on the code, for which I apologize. Right now I’d prefer to write code rather than text, so it’ll stay this way for a while. Of course you’re welcome to chip in on the wiki.

sIFR on Tour

Last Friday I gave two presentations about sIFR. One at Onstuimig in Amersfoort (they’re hiring too!) and one at Info.nl. In the presentations I talked about the history of sIFR and explained how version 3 works. You can read Tom Greuter’s report of my talk at Info.nl at their weblog. I had a great time giving these talks and meeting web people here in Holland, so I’d like to do this more often. Let me know if you’re interested!

Links

Some useful links regarding sIFR 3: