Upcoming features for Fost 4

A new stable version of Fost 4 will be released every three months. The next release will be 21st December 2009.

The features described here are not promised for that release. The release will always be created from trunk and only those features deemed ready will be moved from their feature branches to trunk.

There's still a ton of functionality that's in FOST.3™ that we need to port to Fost 4. Some of the easier things that we'll be starting to look at are:

• Nail down the JSON library API so that the JSON handling can be declared stable.
• Date and time handling.

The largest part of the functionality that is needed and we only have scant support for is the object persistence layer. There's a lot of fairly sophisticated O/RM support in FOST.3™ which is at the same time fairly clunky.

We want the new persistence layer to be able to handle a much wider variety of storage back ends and to do this it needs to be much more pluggable and flexible — we will end up with a persistence toolkit which can be used in a wide variety of circumstances.

Once all of this is done we'll be able to port across the actual applications, like the wiki, forums, issue tracker, cookbook etc.

We are continually looking to improve the build process. We expect there to be more changes here to make the builds faster and more reliable. The next version of Ubuntu will ship with a useful version of Boost so we will need to be able to handle that properly. We expect Ubuntu packages to be ready in time for the next release.

We also hope that the next release will be the first that ships with full Mac support.