It's almost that time again. We have been working really hard to get the Actions up and running, and are probably weeks away from meeting our MS2 goals. Read on to find out what will be in this release and make any comments about what you think. We're looking at having a release by the middle or end of May.

The target for MS2 (MileStone 2) was to get Actions to work, and we've managed to get a whole lot more done during the process. We picked Actions as the second milestone since they touch just about every part of Obversive and would be a make-or-break component. Now we have Actions, dynamic interfaces, an RBackend that can handle R code safely, and a much more polished application in general. It is still a few milestones away from general consumption, but early adopters should have fun playing with all the goodies.

Here's some of the high points of the next release:

1. Nearly complete Actions functionality, with dynamic XML based interfaces, template based code generation, full interfaces, actual documentation on using them, and a couple of sample actions to work with.
2. Actions are configurable dynamically through files placed in a directory hierarchy. This makes it easy to install Actions and create new ones. Action packages will be the next logical step.
3. Actions are (or will be) hooked into the new RBackend and therefore can do actual work.
4. The RBackend is a CORBA based server that handles requests to run R code. It is treated as a langauge neutral component and could be used by any language with a CORBA binding.
5. The RBackend also includes a scanner and parser written from scratch that will validate R code given to it and return improved syntax error messages to the caller. This is used in Obversive to let users find errors in R code, and will eventually be used to provide colorization, and other UI improvements for R handling.
6. Improved startup with the goal of making Obversive act more like a regular application on each platform.
7. A nicer installer and set of packages for each target installation. We'll have user friendly installers for most platforms, and packages for Unix like platforms that use them.
8. Various usability improvements as we found them.
9. An improved build setup and source tree to make it easier for others to build Obversive. It will still take people a while to get all the stuff installed they would need to start building or developing on Obversive. I plan to write a document to help people that want to build from source.

That's all the stuff I can think of at the moment. The next release will really show off some of the target ideas we've been working on in Obversive. With Actions and the RBackend working, people will hopefully have more feedback for us and we'll be able to make improvements in the MS3 release. If you want to see where we're going next, check out our milestone release plan. Please feel free to give us any comments.