News from the Tools Group

The Tools Group has been busy on a number of fronts over the spring, but our primary focus since the last report has been on activities related to the impending release of MiServer 3.0.

MiServer is our APL-based web server that enables Dyalog APL users to host their applications cross-platform on the Internet, an intranet, or stand-alone on any platform where Dyalog APL runs, from a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to an AIX mainframe and everything in between – Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

MiServer 3.0 features a robust library of tools to help the APL user develop web content – even with minimal knowledge of the underlying web technologies of HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. MiServer 3.0 has interfaces to popular JavaScript widget libraries including jQueryUI and SyncFusion. For users who don't need a browser-based front end, MiServer 3.0 also supports the development of RESTful web services, enabling process to process exchange.

MiServer 3.0 is open source and freely available for download on GitHub at https://www.github.com/Dyalog/MiServer. A sample site is available online at http://miserver.dyalog.com.

Other Tools Group projects have included support for the release of Dyalog APL 15.0, new and enhanced user commands, the continued development and extension of our QA suite and updates to some of the workspaces distributed with Dyalog APL.

The next few months will be no less busy for the Tools Group, as we plan to:

• investigate decoupling the distribution of our APL-based tools and utilities from the release cycle of the core interpreter product. This will enable us to distribute updates to the tools library more easily.
• start work on MiServer 4.0, which will feature 2-way data binding and the latest TCP/IP and HTTP communications infrastructure, as well as continue to expand the widget libraries supplied with MiServer.
• enhance our columnar database framework – vecdb, another open-source project that can be found at https://github.com/Dyalog/vecdb.
• begin work on the Dyalog Project Project (a framework to help manage APL-based software development).
• and of course, continue to provide APL expertise to our customers and the interpreter development team.

The Tools Team will be present in force at the Dyalog '16 annual user meeting in Glasgow, where we will be conducting several workshops and presentations.

It's going to be a busy but fun autumn!

If you have any queries on MiServer 3.0 before the user meeting, please contact the MiServer team at miserver@dyalog.com or see the MiServer forum.