Announcing Hax 2.0 Alpha

Hax version 2.0_alpha is now available for download on the Hax download site.
There was a long period of silence.  I am really sorry about this. There were many things that had to be sorted out and there just wasn't any time for other ones, including Hax. Now I finally managed to spare some time and finish up the release of version 2.0, which I started quite long ago.

If you are expecting radical changes in this release, you might end up disappointed. This is mostly a bugfix and minor improvements release.

Most of the changes were done in HaxOS. It now supports complex paths using '..', and includes a help system (try the 'help' command). From the internal point of view, the kernel API has been simplified, so that developing scripts against it becomes easier. Support for other scripting languages was added directly to the shell, but you need to have the relevant libraries on the classpath, so this is a topic to be covered in another blog post. For your information, I was able to make working scripts in Python, Ruby, Lua and Clojure.

Other tweaks include changes to the DragonConsole component regarding duplicate entries in command history, and a menu option was added to clear the console. There were bugfixes for some threading issues and the changed behaviour of the higher version of Groovy that is used now.

The biggest thing of this release, however, is the support of custom data center and script development. This consists of several steps that were done:

• The Hax API documentation has been published, see the Links section on where you can find it.
• A sample data center has been created, which contains well-documented scripts and data center configuration files to get you started developing your own scripts and data centers. The sample data center is distributed in a separate ZIP file on the Hax downloads page. Simply unzip the file inside your Hax installation directory (folder) and you can run the data center as described in the Hax README file.
• An account on GitHub was created to distribute resources for Hax data center developers, see the Links section on where you can find it. So far, the Hax API documentation and the sample data center  source files have been published there. More stuff will hopefully follow.
• An Eclipse IDE project has been created to easily get you started with your custom data centers and scripts. The project contains all necessary dependencies to leverage all the features of the Eclipse platform during data center and script development. Eclipse is the only officially supported development environment for Hax. You can download the project on the Hax downloads page. After downloading, read the instructions in the contained README.md file on how to get started.
• If you have any questions regarding development, feel free to post in the new Development section of the Hax discussion group. 

Note that I have not managed to finish the sample data center as I planned. Only about 40% of the original plan was implemented. So the scripts in it are just very basic, and will probably not be sufficient to learn anything complex. Next on my task list is to finish the sample data center. Note that I will publish updates to the GitHub repository, the ZIP file on the Hax download page will not be updated until everything is finished. So be sure to familiarize yourself with GitHub, and maybe even check out the current version of the data center using Git, so you can be up-to-date at all times. GitHub has some great features and I would prefer everybody to use GitHub to publish their public data centers and scripts for Hax there.

Also, be sure to re-read the Hax README file, the way Hax is launched has again changed to better support custom data centers.

As usual, if you encounter any problems or have comments, let me know using the discussion group or contact me directly.