That’s right, our support for PPL 1.x is not over. We are actively updating it as work progresses on version 2.0. Version 1.60 will include the most-needed speed boost that users have wanted. We have optimized the bytecode compiler once more, making the code cleaner and faster.

There is an IMPORTANT news about 1.60 that we cannot announce just yet but it will certainly make a lot of you very very happy…

As you may know from my earlier posts here in the blog or in our forums http://forum.arianesoft.ca, I am using a MacBook Pro with Parallels Desktop with two Virtual Machines (one XP and one Vista) to do my development.

As I am now supporting two versions 1.x and 2.0 for the PPL compiler/interpreter (same source codes), I needed a better way to sync the two folders on each VM. Before I was using Visual Studio 6 on the XP machine to do my development of the compiler/interpreter. Now I am using Visual Studio 2008 on a Vista machine for PPL 2.0’s compiler/interpreter.

What I decided to do is to share the PPL folder on the Vista machine with the XP machine. They can both run at the same time (without very little slowdowns, if any) and use one Folder that is shared between the two virtual machines.

For the PIDE, I don’t have this problem because they are two different projects, since the PIDE 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch.

So this is what I have been doing today as well as tweaking and polishing PPL 2.0 even more. I have added the ability to select multiple objects and edit the common properties and events that they share. This is very handy for more complex projects. I am tweaking the code generation process to make it more streamlined and less complex internally.

More news later this week about 2.0 and 1.53…

Here we go, the future is here, well almost anyway…

This post will detail some of the new paths that the PPL product will take very soon.

Starting with 1.53, the protection in the PIDE will be much simpler than before. There used to be some very complicated copy protection but unfortunately it caused more problems than expected.

Starting with 1.60 (which is the next release after 1.53 and the last 1.x release) will be very different. The compiler/interpreter (PPL.EXE) will be entirely free. You won’t be able to generate executable files or change file’s icons directly from the pocket pc anymore. The generation of executable files will only be possible from the PIDE program on the desktop. The editor and visual form builder PPL programs will be maintained by the community and not be officially supported by ArianeSoft anymore.

The same will still be true with version 2.0. The compiler/interpreter will remain free. The PIDE will be able to compress your executables on the fly.