Amiga NEAT Framework

Before we can start coding on Amiga specific classes, we first had to do some work on the object model of Neat. As with a lot of frameworks, we needed a base object, in our case, called “NObject”. At this moment, it does not have much functionality. A very important step was to make a static “instance container”, which keeps track of all objects created in your code. With the static method “NObject::FindObject()” you can trace back any instance of an object by its name. We will implement some more helper functions for instance tracking later, but this first one is just there to give you an idea of what we are doing. Please check the documentation for an example on this method. NObject is not in the framework version 0.8 which went public last week. It will take some more time to make it public, so check our weekly announcement update here to see if you can start using it.

After accomplishing “the basics”, we are now going into more “Amiga-like” things. The next steps will be going towards files and sockets. Together with these “IO” classes, we will also be working on task and process classes, to automate the use of tasks and processes on the Amiga. I think IO and this “multitasking” thing will go hand in hand. Starting from this moment, a lot of research and testing has to be done on the Amiga, so I presume it will take a bit of time until you can see the result in new “Neat” classes. Have some patience, we are working very hard on these matters. We want rock solid classes (as usual), and this cooking will definitely take some time. Please make a weekly visit, I will get you posted in the general announcements, and if some work has been done, you will find the new classes (as usual) in the class announcement section.

No new classes this week. Actually, we are working hard on the NDate class. As you probably know (or not), date calculations can be a pain in the *ss, a lot of research had to be done to get information on the internals of date calculations. God, one could write a whole book about it. Anyway, we are working hard on this one, including the localisation of weekday and monthnames from the local settings of your Amiga. As soon as we get it up and running, we will also run a couple of tests against AOS 4.1 update 1 to see everything is OK (as soon as we can obtain it from Hyperion, because this morning at 9:19 the site was still down). So please come back and visit us again, we will keep you informed.