Yeah, I’ve been down in the hole for a few months. I know I didn’t keep anyone posted on what was going on with Enano, but as of right now all is revealed.

Enano’s development and progress towards its gold release is going pretty much as planned, albeit a lot slower than originally expected. As mentioned in the last post, it got a bad case of feature creep. But the hard work has paid off. Enano 1.0RC1 will be released tomorrow, after two months since the 1.0b4 release. As was implied by the RC1 release date, Enano will use a codename theme of Irish mythical characters: RC1 will be Leprechaun, RC2 will be Clurichaun, and the gold release will be Banshee (hence the “wail of the banshee” joke on the testbay front page).

I didn’t have time to do as much QA as I wanted. I’ve already gone around and fixed *a lot* of bugs since the so-called code freeze last night. The security audits have been less intensive than I had hoped, and Neal, who was going to be doing some virtualized testing on Windows servers, had an unfortunate problem with his Internet connection (wasn’t his fault), so Enano hasn’t been completely tested with some versions of IIS.

I hope you all enjoy using Leprechaun as much as I loved putting it together. Cheers!

Edit: I just realized it’s past midnight. So Leprechaun gets released today.

It seems that over the past month, I’ve become obsessed over cool Javascript/AJAX stuff. That’s all well and good - after all, half the web’s been bitten by the AJAX bug. But when you’re a web developer, you often go through these things called “code spasms”, where your brain just starts coming up with code so fast that you forget to eat, sleep, or even update your blog.

That happened to me one weekend, and as a result, Enano is going to have support for access control lists and usergroups in RC1. I know it would have been a better idea to delay it all until 1.2, but my instincts had already taken over. Before I knew it, it was morning, and I had a very cool-looking frontend (AJAX/JSON/modal dialogs) to a powerful ACL control backend. I also threw in usergroup support, and hacked up an admin panel for it. So far, it works perfectly if you have a standards-compliant browser (read: anything made in the last 3 years that did not come from Redmond, WA) that supports CSS3 and AJAX. Soon there will be a frontend compatible with the pitiful browser that Bill’s grandma wrote.

My target release date is the end of this month. I’m aiming to release RC1 on St. Patrick’s Day, which is why RC1 is codenamed “Leprechaun.” Cheers!