Linux port, new framework releases, mail sorting and industrial control software

The Linux port of The Server Framework is going really well and we now have investigated both libuv and epoll back ends. There’s still a lot of work to do before this will be something that we’re releasing generally but the client’s that are working with us on this are really excited by how well it’s going.

The massively modernised, and far in the future 7.0 release of The Server Framework will include the Linux changes and our 6.9.2 maintenance release is due for release in Q2; it’s been a while since we last had a release but there have been no bugs reported and so there’s not really much to release as most of the effort is going into the stuff that will eventually become the 7.0 release.

Our work with the large American postal company that will remain nameless is about to go into an extended pilot phase and we’re working on last minute adjustments so that the new system plays nicely with the existing system that it will eventually be replacing.

The work with our Industrial Control Client in Germany is going really well. Phase 1 is complete and we’ve replaced the networking layer in one of their key pieces of software and refactored away the accumulated cruft from 30 years of maintenance. We have a shiny new testing system that we’ve written to help us compare the old message flow to the new message flow to ensure that we haven’t changed anything that we shouldn’t. This intercepts the network traffic and deblocks the messages for given test scenarios and then compares to the previous version of the code. Great for hassle free regression testing.

In summary, we’re very busy doing what we love to do!