LiveCode Community Launches
Our very first Open Source release of LiveCode is here

By Heather Laine and Mark Waddingham

After a month of intense activity, much burning of the midnight oil and amid quite a splash of publicity, we're proud to be able to say we launched LiveCode Community on 9th April. This is the very first "as is" edition, made to allow everyone to download and start coding for free. We will follow up with the all singing, all dancing modularised version, with the promised stretch goals from our Kickstarter campaign, in the fall (autumn, to all you brits out there.)

This is a huge milestone in LiveCode and RunRev's history, and so far it has been very well received. In the first few days after launch the traffic to our website was such that it required fulltime attention from our server admins to make sure it did not fall over under the load! Things have calmed down a little now, and as the dust settles I'd like to bring you a little of the feedback we have received.

"Fantastic! Downloaded LiveCode 6.0 and had a fully-functional app installed on my Android tablet within minutes.

Then I got a GitHub account to check the open source version. I realise it will be Autumn (Fall) before the code is knocked into shape, but as soon as instructions for compiling LiveCode become available I will have a go. LiveCode will join wxWidgets as another C++ project from Edinburgh I can work on. (Obviously, it would be better if RunRev were based in Leith but one can't have everything)." ~ Frederick Collier

"This amazing Kickstarter campaign to set LiveCode free under a GLP3 license has finally come to fruition and you can not believe how happy I am for having had the opportunity to be participating on this amazing journey.

The fact that you can now download v6.0 of the community edition of the development environment for free at http://www.runrev.com/products/Open-Source/Which-Version-Do-I-Need - is just... well AWESOME!!!"~ Einar Petersen

In terms of external contributions we have quite a lot going on...

Mark Wieder (with help from Matt Peterson) has been working hard on getting the engine to run on 64-bit Linux. This looks like it is going well, hopefully we'll be able to start putting out Linux x64 builds within the next month so that we can get things stable on that architecture.

Monte Goulding is responsible for the very first external pull-request being integrated. He's implemented a (ide-only) feature for doing image object lookup relative to another object with the aim of speeding up VCS. It should also help fix a number of long standing bugs in the Image Library and Standalone Builder with regards copying the right image objects.

Monte has submitted a couple of further pull-requests which are pending for the next non-maintenance release. The first is the addition of 'the effective visible' of an object - returning true or false depending on whether the object is actually visible on the card, and not just its own visible property (i.e. it checks the visibility of any parent groups). The second is the updating of 'the properties' to better reflect the properties objects of the various different types actually have.

He is now at work on generalizing 'setProp' and 'getProp' handlers to work with engine properties conditional on the case that they are present in the object script or object's behavior script. See the thread on that for more details.

Trevor DeVore has been looking into getting access to the custom color swatches that a user can set in the color dialogs on the desktop platforms - this will allow these to be saved along with a document as you can in other applications.

There's been some good discussion on adding a method to generate UUIDs on all platforms - there's a few niggling details here still to sort out (due to needing to support 5 different platforms) but at least a start has been made there.

Internally, lots has been going on too...

We've been working hard on getting to a 6.0.1 release - the first (and hopefully only) rc of which should appear today. This release contains a number of regression fixes, as well as improved build scripts and projects for all platforms since the initial Open-Source release.

We've also done some work on reintroducing the 'cgi' mode of the IDE and Standalone engines - this mode allows you to pass a stack (or text file) on the command-line to them and have them run it. See the thread on that for more details. There's still a little more work to do here, but hopefully it will appear after 6.0.1.

We've been working towards completely automating the build process - including generating release notes and building a complete set of installers for all (desktop) platforms from a single script. This is the first step towards a Continuous Integration process that should see us being able to push out new builds much more regularly, based on commits to the main branches in the git repository.

Additionally, we've been working on improving the documentation we provide about the LiveCode Community project. We're still fleshing out and improving our processes in this regard so it's going to be a little bit longer before we update the docs online - however, we are making excellent progress so do bear with us on that.

In terms of 'what to expect next'...

We're starting to look at integrating the XML doc sources into the git repository and adding the necessary scripts to have them built into the form the IDE. This will then mean we can start accepting contributions to the docs - including documentation for new features much more easily. I'm hoping these will get pushed out in the form of a (very small) 6.0.2 release within the next couple of weeks.

We'll be starting off the development branch in the git repo in a week or so's time with a view to starting work on the next non-maintenance release. We've already got a couple of features from Monte to integrate, and will update you on what we're hoping to include there shortly.

We're also reviewing the wording of the contributors agreement, where it should apply and more generally the issue of posting code in the forums and on the mailing list. More on this in time when we've battled through the legalities of it all.

Thanks to you all for a very successful start to the LiveCode Community project!