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.

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.

A week ago, we started the cycle of intermediate releases of 6.2. They can be found on the EiffelStudio development site at http://eiffelstudio.origo.ethz.ch.

After using Origo Alpha extensively in our courses, the platform has now reached beta stage and has been received well by the public.

You can create a user and register a project here: http://origo.ethz.ch

This week-end, I was at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego for the ACM Awards Banquet where the various ACM awards are given, including the ACM Turing Award (given for the first time to a woman, Frances Allen) and, of interest to me, the Software System Award given to Eiffel and Bertrand Meyer.

It started with a cocktail on Saturday evening:

Yesterday the first alpha version of origo has been launched. Origo is a platform for distributed development and user interaction. It is built on a middleware architecture that uses JXTA and is written in Eiffel. This middleware provides an xmlrpc api which is used by a website to access and update data.

See more at: http://origo.alpha.origo.ethz.ch/