Can you please enlighten me on the LiveCode versions?

[Richard Gaskin]

Heather doesn't normally monitor this list, but your questions are 
similar to ones raised in my local LC user group and elsewhere, so let 
me don my Community Manager cap and see if I can help answer them:

MCLAWHORN, TONY wrote:

 > Heather
 >
 > I've been searching for some answers but have not found any yet.
 > The question is which version of LiveCode should I be using?
 > LiveCode 6.6.4 (rc1) was just announced... what about LiveCode
 > 7.0 (rc2)?

The current shipping version is v6.6.4, released this morning.

 From time to time there are test versions available as well, such as 
we have with v6.7rc2 and v7rc2 currently.

If you have time and interest in helping to test pre-release builds 
(designated with DP and RC on the Downloads page), everyone in the 
community benefits from this so we can all have that much more 
confidence that the final build will meet our needs.

But if you need stability, the most recent public release build is the 
best bet, as those are the versions the community has tested and can no 
longer find show-stoppers for.

You can find all downloads here, with a note at the top distinguishing 
the various release designations:
<http://downloads.livecode.com/livecode/>


 > I'm just confused as to why LiveCode is putting effort into what
 > seems to me to be two parallel programs doing the same thing at
 > which at one point I assume they will be phased out and we'll
 > have LiveCode 8.0.

It's even a bit more boggling than that:  up until this morning, there 
were a total of four parallel versions in development: 8.0, 7.0, 6.7, 
and 6.6.4.  Now with 6.6.4 out the door we're down to three.

All this may seem daunting, but it's perhaps the biggest benefit of the 
major refactoring that began last year, so the project can now take good 
advantage of GitHub's assistance with managing and merging multiple 
branches of a code base.

Here's a brief outline of these versions, and as you read this please 
keep in mind the benefits of isolating the major scopes of change in 
each one:

Version 8
---------
Introduces Open Language, the foundation that makes Widgets, Themes, and 
other key elements of the Kickstarter goals possible.

In short, it allows both the core dev team at RunRev and us in the 
community to do many things in LiveCode that would otherwise need to be 
done in C.  We all enjoy the productivity benefits of using LiveCode's 
high-level scripting language, and Open Language extends that to support 
more core-level work so the range of applicable use cases become much 
broader.

For a sneak peak at where it's headed, see the video in Kevin's blog entry:
<http://livecode.com/blog/2014/07/08/the-next-generation-widgets-themes/>


Version 7
---------
The main emphasis here is Unicode, sweeping in scope when you consider 
that so much of what we do deals with strings, from text parsing to 
object labels and so much more.   With v7 every string - even the 
contents of a variable - is Unicode-aware.  And best of all, for the 
most part this is entirely transparent to us; we just keep using the 
chunk expressions and other language elements as we have, and the engine 
keeps track of the encoding for us.

Additionally, the Linux engine has undergone significant revision for 
tighter integration with GDK, the GUI APIs that drive most Linux 
systems.   While the Linux audience represents only a slender portion of 
license revenue, work on the Linux engine is disproportionately valuable 
to RunRev and all of us by catering to an audience that understands and 
supports open source process.  Indeed, AFAIK thus far the only code 
contributions coming from anyone not already using LiveCode for many 
years have been from Linux users.


Version 6.7
-----------
The main focus of this version is migrating the Mac LiveCode engine to 
Apple's Cocoa APIs from the deprecated Carbon APIs it had used before. 
With each new version of OS X Apple drops more and more support for 
Carbon, so this had to be done ASAP.   It was a huge task, but has come 
along surprisingly well, resulting in much-improved behavior and 
appearance of LiveCode apps in Mac systems.


Version 6.6.4
-------------
The whole 6.6.x series merely extends the state of the engine from 6.0, 
with each build containing relatively few enhancements while 
incorporating a great many fixes (over the last year more than 1,360 
reported issues have been fixed).


At this point, just about everything in terms of both new features and 
bug fixes are integrated forward; e.g., everything in 6.7 is also in 
v7.0, with each new version representing a superset of capabilities.



 > Any input will greatly relieve my mind and maybe give me better
 > info as to which version I need to be using while waiting on
 > version 8.0.   By-the-way,  I been waiting for the better part of
 > a year waiting for sockets to be available for mobile devices.
 > Any hope you can give me on that front?  I really don't want to
 > die of old age before I get a chance to create apps just waiting
 > for mobile sockets (iOS and Android).

At this point HTTP GET and POST are supported in both iOS and Android, 
covering a majority of needs for accessing Web-based services.

If you need to define your own custom protocols, that's queued as part 
of the Open Language work thread on the Road Map:
<http://livecode.com/community/roadmap/>

Yes, it has been a while that we've been wanting it, but the scope of 
socket and protocol enhancement we really need (including OAuth, SFTP, 
and more) is best suited for when it can leverage the benefits of being 
able to write it in LiveCode, as was done with the simpler libURL for 
HTTP/HTTPS.

With 6.6.4 out the door and both 6.7 and 7.0 nearly done, much of the 
team has been transitioned to focus on v8.0, and with it comes Open 
Language and many of the remaining Road Map items dependent on it.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org