Monday, 20 October 2008

Announcement
============
  The members of the Components Team at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory <components@llnl.gov> are pleased to
announce Babel 1.4.0, the next major step in Babel research.

What's New
==========
  The following features have been added, or completed, in
this release:

  + Babel now includes CHASM-lite as part of the distribution, so you
    no longer should pre-install CHASM (since 1.0).
  + Major autotools upgrade
  + New --makefile option for basic GNU Makefile generation
  + Support for PathScale compilers
  + Lots of little fixes and portability improvements
  + Bundle libparsifal instead of using libxml2 (since 1.0)
  + Experimental struct support in C, C++, and Python
  + F2003 binding includes experimental struct support
  + Latest interface contract enforcement support (beta)

(Also refer to the CHANGES file for more details.)

What Babel Is
=============
  Babel is designed to address problems of language 
interoperability, particularly in scientific/engineering
applications.  At the simplest level, Babel generates glue 
code so that libraries written in one programming language 
are callable from other programming languages.  Babel
generates this glue code from an interface description
written in SIDL, our Scientific Interface Definition 
Language.  Babel supports full Object-Oriented features
and exception handling even in non-OO languages such as C
or Fortran77.

  Babel also addresses platform interoperability through
its support for Remote Method Invocation (RMI), an
object-oriented form of remote procedure calls (RPC).
Babel RMI gives programmers the ability to write
distributed programs with minimal change to their 
existing source.

Supported Languages
===================
  Babel currently supports calling libraries written in 
C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, Java, or Python from drivers written 
in either C, C++, Fortran77, Fortran90, Python or Java.  (Python 
support also requires the Numerical Python set of extensions at 
http://numpy.sourceforge.net/ ).


Supported Platforms
===================
Linux 
IBM BG/L
Jaguar
Solaris
AIX (except Python server)
Mac OSX (not fully supported)

Caveat
======
  Babel is research in progress.  This is a release candidate for a
production release, but it is still supported by a research effort.
Babel has been used on numerous projects now. Documentation for
the newest features may not be complete. We suggest checking our
WWW site for our recent presentations about new features.

Availability
============
  The software is available for free download at
        http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/components


User Resources
==============
  Two email lists have been set up for the Babel community:

        babel-users@llnl.gov  (unmoderated discussions)
        babel-announce@llnl.gov (announcements only)

To subscribe to one or both of these email lists, send
email to <majordomo@lists.llnl.gov> with the text
"subscribe babel-announce", "subscribe babel-users",
or both (one per line).  


Contacting the Authors
======================
  If you have any questions or concerns with the installation 
process or usage of Babel, feel free to contact the project team 
at components@llnl.gov.  To report bugs or suggest feature 
enhancements, please submit a report in the bug database at 
https://www.cca-forum.org/bugs/babel/, or send email to 
babel-bugs@cca-forum.org.

$Id: ANNOUNCE 6548 2008-10-10 17:14:08Z epperly $
