A project I started a few years ago (I could say completed but I got bored) I've recently revisited and just updated to use newer Eiffel syntax. It concerned itself with something not too often published uses for Eiffel, an API stack whose bottom layer interacts with low level system calls to manipulate hardware.

A while ago I've heard about Haiku through an online Google Tech Talk. I was immediately captivated because Haiku is actually a clone of BeOS and I definitely remember the BeOS days. It was when Mac OS was not up to the task anymore and BeOS seemed a promising alternative.

In EiffelStudio 6.2, Eiffel Information System (EIS) will be introduced. The goal of EIS is to provide a unified mechanism for linking development objects — classes and features, or even targets and groups — of Eiffel systems with external information. This term refers to information other than Eiffel program texts.

Facts

It's unlike me to complain (or maybe it's not, up to you to decide), but in the past few years it seems that software vendors have decided what was best for me and I really do not like this, especially when it affects 100% of the time I'm in front of my computer.

Eiffel gets a little mention in the influence of Spec# and Sing#, used in the authoring of Microsoft's Singularity research OS. Check out the mention on Ars Technica

I don't know if you are like me but often when you redefine a feature, I used to copy/paste the comments so that I still know what the feature is supposed to do in english terms (in addition to the contracts of course). In 6.2, we are introducing a new facility so that in the editor and in the flat-view of the feature you do not have to do the copy/paste.

Six months ago I asked people from the community to file in a questionnaire. The questionnaire validates the CDD approach quite well!

We had two major outcomes:

Beta 2 of our integrated unit testing extension is online now. We are hard at work to finalize the last features and hammer out all remaining bugs. Highlights of this release include:

• Based on EiffelStudio 6.1
• Simpler and more rubust way to create new manual test case
• Automated Execution and Extraction enabled by default
• Testing related windows visible by default

Dear all:

we have just released CDD (short for Contract Driven Development) for EiffelStudio Beta1. CDD brings full unit test support (including IDE integration) to EiffelStudio. It adds support for a novel kind of test cases, so called extracted test cases: when an exception is thrown it automatically creates a new test case which is able to reproduce the observed failure.

Eiffel is based (according to Wikipedia) on a set of principles:

• Design by contract
• Command-query separation
• Uniform access principle
• Single choice principle
• Open-closed principle
• Option-Operand separation