April 21, 2007

ContextL 0.40.

I have just released version 0.40 of ContextL. The idea is that this version is feature-complete with regard to the feature set of the upcoming 1.0 release. The goal is now to test this version extensively, and to write a documentation of the current features and the API of ContextL before version 1.0 is eventually released.

There have been some changes in the API which are listed at the ContextL homepage. These are mostly cosmetic changes, like better names for functions, etc.

However, there are also some new features. The most interesting ones are probably several readers for the main ContextL metaclasses, such that the introspective part of ContextL is now complete, and a function current-layer-context. The latter can be used to capture the set of currently active layers, which can later be reinstalled for example with funcall-with-layer-context. Current-layer-context should be interesting for example to "inherit" active layers to/from threads in multithreaded Common Lisp implementations, or to capture active layers alongside continuations such that they can both be reinstalled together later on. This could, for example, be interesting in conjunction with continuation-based web frameworks.

For more details, see the ContextL homepage and announcements/discussions in the closer-devel mailing list.

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