Thursday, July 15, 2010

Skulker Version 1.0.0 nearly here!

It has taken quite a bit longer than expected to get round to polishing Skulker for a 1.0.0 release! The main reason in this instance was not lack of time - but instead adding of a feature that had not originally been intended for inclusion - native Windows support!

Yep - you read that correctly. A couple of people have asked for this and so the file handling was radically overhauled to handle the differences between Windows and UNIX environments. Not as straightforward as it may sound.

The support for threading is there too - for compression rules at the moment. This was not easy and required the whole of the software source to be modified significantly to ensure it ran with or without threads using the same software.

Threading forced out two further changes; the requirement to run Skulker in "strict" mode in Perl - forcing out several unknown bugs, and also to support internal compression functionality available with Perl.

The Google code page has been refreshed with the new code and at present documentation and testing continues. However the bulk of the work is done and version 1.0.0 will be with us very soon.