First of all, we updated the release plan to reflect the latest changes in the software and its schedules.

As usual, the announced dates are well estimated but without obligation and subject to change without further notice due to unexpected events. Nevertheless, we hope to give a quite realistic and deliberate perspective of Antville's future.

One very important task is not contained in the list (since it is about the development of Antville, the software, only): we hope to upgrade the Antville installation at Antville.org to a fresh and clean version (ie. 1.1final) until the end of May 2004.

We think the lovely folks hosting their weblogs at this first and already famous incarnation of a public Antville installation really deserve this upgrade already since a long time. Thus, we promise to take some of our spare time and the appropriate measures to make the transition from this meanwhile pretty patched-up Antville version to a full-featured Antville-as-we-know-and-love-it installation a snap and as easy as possible.

Then there is the Antville Library, a side-project of our development activities, which serves as a generic scripting code base for publishing applications using Helma and which is – besides in Antville itself – already used in other software projects, too.

Not so surprisingly, this library lacks documentation and still needs to consolidate and settle down to become a reliable toolbox. We expect it to be finalized this summer, probably together with another library project which will contain generic Helma extensions like e.g. a more flexible HTTP client or SSH-capable file transfer features. So far the gossip goes.

The most important step, however, already has happened last month behind the scenes and apart from public attention – but it probably will have the biggest impact on Antville Project: we founded an association called eigentext to promote open-source publishing software.

This association will become the future owner of Antville as well as of its library and is thought as an open platform for related projects. (E.g. parss is a potential candidate to crawl under eigentext's wings.)

In consequence, this means that there will be minor changes in the Antville license, transitions in the CVS repository, slight shifts in the Antville mailing-lists and a new focus of our general approach in developing Antville.

As you might already wondered: it certainly is possible to become a member of eigentext. Memberhip acquisition and application will happen on the association's website which is yet to come. So please hold on a little further. We will keep you informed.

The bad message: we had to change the case of the HopObject prototypes in Antville inside the CVS repository.

(The good message: It does not only work, it works very well!)

This means the current main branch of the Antville CVS repository is most likely incompatible with former Antville CVS branches (because the old prototype names are not available anymore).

Thus, we provide the most recent sources of Antville 1.1.pre2 as it was before the update as extra CVS module which can serve as an archive copy. Please note, however, that write access to this module is disabled to prevent any updates in there.

You should be very careful with the next CVS update of your local working copy of Antville: a simple CVS update command will most likely end in a bunch of errors or in a corrupted local working copy.

We recommend to backup your Antville application directory before and only then do a fresh and clean CVS checkout of Antville.

Then copy the app.properties and db.properties from your backup copy to the new Antville application directory and you should be fine.

Btw. we found a fine solution to avoid finding completely new names for the Image and File prototypes. Generally, these prototypes are already provided by Helma herself and we are aware of the fact that Antville is now overriding these.

However, we implemented what we consider the future of Helma extensions including the Mail, FtpClient etc. prototypes: there is now a global JavaScript object called Helma which currently carries along the constructors and methods for File and Image objects. (But other prototypes easily can be added.)

Both, Helma and Antville, could benefit from this because it prevents the global namespace from being cluttered and we as application designers are more flexible in naming our custom prototypes.

Another important change which hopefully will enable more people joining the adventure of developing Antville functionality we tried to achieve with a first basic set of hooks for external modules.

It now should be easy to add navigation, preferences or the like to Antville from within a module simply by adding some kind of interface methods to the module code.

We will post a detailed description of the module functionalities on the antville-dev mailing-list, soon.