Release 0.5

Release 0.5 represented a step forward into the framework being more stable, robust, and usable. A new cross-platform build system was devised for making the process of creating a CLAM makefile or Visual project easy and transparent to the user, this tool is generically called Srcdeps. Formal and thorough testing was introduced through the use of he external CppUnit testing framework.

The network mode is implemented in about 90%, with a fully working Visual Builder (see definition of Visual Builder in section 1.3.3), called Network Editor, that allows to construct CLAM networks (see 3.2.3). It is becoming clearer every time that it makes no sense to make the distinction between the two modes. The usage of Ports and Networks (see 3.2.2) will become first the recommended, then the standard and finally the only way of building a CLAM system. The only difference that still exists and is meant to stay that way between the Visual Builder approach and the more traditional black/white-box approach is that in the former an automatic flow control and scheduling engine is deployed.

Long-sought full 100% support to Mac OSX has been introduced in this release, including support for platform abstraction such as audio input/output.

Other important issues include a major rework of the Visualization module and XML facilities and many new features introduced into the AnalysisSynthesisExample, which from this release on will be called SMS Example (or SMSTools in its GUI version). The implementation of Descriptors was addressed during this release although will not be finished until future releases. Finally many new simple usage examples were introduced and code cleanup was addressed throughout.