Empowering teams of developers.Eiffel Software announced today the IRON facility package manager that will soon be available with the upcoming release of the EiffelStudio IDE, version 14.05. IRON provides an easy-to-use facility for using and sharing libraries of quality Eiffel components. It automates many of the tasks involved with publishing such libraries and provides a consistent method of doing so with minimal effort.
As a parallel to the Eiffel name itself, the “IRON’ terminology was chosen to reflect the fact that the individual building blocks of the Eiffel Tower were themselves made from iron. In the Eiffel world, constructing a large complex software system is done with libraries of high-quality reusable components. Thus, the “building blocks” are made from iron, and software systems are made from those building blocks. Hence, IRON provides the “raw material” from which complex Eiffel systems are developed.
Still in the beta phase until the new EiffelStudio release, IRON is an open-source community project . It is fully integrated within EiffelStudio and provides command-line application.
“The Eiffel community is thirsty for libraries. With IRON, we are taking an important step in this direction as it makes it all that much easier for those working on Eiffel libraries to share and use them,” says Jocelyn Fiat, Head of Library and Web Development “I am happy to have contributed to this effort because I know that I’m facilitating the lives of many Eiffel programmers out there. Let’s hope we’ll start seeing some more Eiffel libraries and that people will also be encouraged to share existing ones.”
For more information, see IRON: Eiffel Package Repository. To get started, download EiffelStudio.
EiffelStudio is based on the Eiffel programming language, the most extensive implementation of O-O concepts, standardized through ECMA and the International Standards Organization. Its core concepts, native only to Eiffel, such as Design by Contract™, seamless development, automatic testing, void safety, parallel programming, and modelling facilities allow developers to write predictable and controllable applications that are easy to maintain. EiffelStudio, which received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award, is used by developers and design-team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in all areas of software development such as finance, health, defense…. With EiffelStudio, the applications they build run flawlessly 24×7, 365 days a year.
