The last weeks have been quite busy workwise, and I'm proud to announce that we finally released a first glimpse of what Elisa 0.5 is going to be.

What was formerly known as the new REST architecture is now officialy the 0.5 development series. Elisa 0.5 is a complete rewrite of the core of Elisa to overcome all the problems encountered with the old architecture and make it easily extensible. The plugin system was already in place, but with the new architecture we made it much easier to write new plugins, including pieces of UI, which formerly required nasty hacks and a significant integration effort.

This early release is of course intended for developers, it is not by any means a stable version, it is not packaged and it does not even have the basic Media Center functionalities. But everything needed to start playing with it is present.

If you cannot wait to get your hands on it, check out the bzr branch from launchpad: 

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/0.5 elisa

You will need a development branch of pigment for the python widgets, see http://elisa.fluendo.com/contribute for instructions on how to get started.

We are aware that so far Elisa's weak point was the lack of documentation, and we have put special efforts in improving this. The API documentation has been updated, and two brand new tutorials will help you write a plugin from scratch.

We have changed a lot of things in the development process of Elisa, and I must say it is a real pleasure to work on this project. We are now using Launchpad in conjunction with bzr to manage our source code. All the bug reports from the Trac are being migrated as I am writing. Working with bzr branches allows a tremendous gain in efficiency and code quality: before merging a branch into the main development branch, the changes have to be reviewed by at least two other developers. The whole review process is tracked by a Bundle Buggy instance (currently private, but the reviews happen on the elisa-commits public mailing list). Code quality has been reinforced with the arrival of a QA manager in the team, we now have better and more relevant tests, and code coverage statistics.

The most exciting is to come though, because we can now start writing the real Media Center features, and trust me, we are not short of ideas!

A quick word on the win32 port, our Windows team deserves it, they invested a lot of efforts into porting to Windows the 0.3 branch (formerly known as trunk). An alpha release with an installer for XP and Vista is now available, we expect to deliver a stable version in June!

Stay tuned for more exciting news and surprises, the coming weeks should not be disappointing.