After a pause of several months, we are delighted that development of OLab4 has resumed. We now having funding from a few sources, enough to make a sustained push to get things pushed out the door… and soon.
While we were paused, we took the opportunity to examine where we had gotten to in the development roadmap. It had become clear that sticking with the Entrada framework had too many limitations.
It had also become clear that remaining with the PHP and Javascript base was now too limiting. It had been chosen because that was the most common way to develop a browser-based application in the academic world. But things have moved on and Microsoft’s .Net environment now has so much more to offer.
Since OpenLabyrinth was originally written in Microsoft ASP, it kinda seemed like going back to old ground… and old problems. But .Net is now fully open-source and works across a variety of operating systems. Academic computing is now largely cloud-based, as is so much application software. Using .Net allows us to be either server-based or cloud-based, and affords a whole new degree of scalability if we need it in the future.
Our team has been exploring the difficulties of migrating our codebase across to .Net — it has been great to find that these difficulties are way less than expected. It has also made further development more flexible and has opened up a bunch of new options for us, which I will write about shortly.
There is a big enough change to the functionality of this new codebase that we are releasing it as version 4.5 … and when will this happen?? Soon, young Padewan, soon.