Logo of CO-LaN smallCO-LaN released today a new stable version of the CAPE-OPEN Logging and Testing Tool (COLTT): version 1.08.4.

Version 1.08, apart from resolving a few issues found in COLTT 1.07, has been refactored compared to the previous versions of COLTT. Why did CO-LaN launch a refactoring process?

As stated by Michael Halloran, acting as consultant to CO-LaN on these matters, the audit he conducted on the COLTT source at the beginning of 2008 showed up a number of generic problems that appeared repeatedly in different loggers as a result of duplicated code. During the early phases of COLTT development, the code was duplicated because that was initially the quickest way to increase the coverage of the loggers. Of course the result was that defects were duplicated too, and it made it hard to make functional enhancements.

The refactoring improves the design so that rather than a logger providing its own implementation of all the interfaces it needs to log, as was the case in 1.07, now the different interfaces each have their own logger and these can be combined together to create the loggers for different types of PMC. That means much less duplication.

The refactoring also makes it much quicker to add any new loggers because the shared interfaces like ICapeUtilities and ICapeIdentification are already implemented.

Development of version 1.08 was done on behalf of CO-LaN by SHMA in Pakistan with help and supervision from Michael Halloran.

You are encouraged to use COLTT within the verification of the interoperability between a PMC and a PME. Should you find a bug in COLTT, do not hesitate to use the bug-tracking system attached to the COLTT project.