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Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 3:32 am

The PUBLIC version of the zApp Development System has been released.
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It's finally here! I have released the 2.3 public version of zApp. As indicated by the "public" status (as opposed to Beta status), I have determined that zApp is now stable enough and full of enough features for serious use by 3rd party developers.

Additional releases will continue over the summer as bugs are fixed and as new features continue to be added.

My plan between now and the Shareware conference in July is to work on some marketing aspects, write a white-paper on zApp, add more tutorials, continue with more documentation, and work on the zApp Pro IDE.

Later this week I should have the Mantis bug-tracking system for zApp up and running. Until then (I'll announce it in another topic), just create new topics in this forum to report any bugs that you find.

Also, unlike the weekly CVS build updates, I have uploaded ALL of the new zApp files, including the free zAppLite, and the latest version of the zAppPro IDE.

In particular, the new version of zAppPro IDE has the Link option that allows you to link your ZXL file to the ZAPPLITE.EXE and create a new EXE file for your application that can be deployed. See the DOCVIEW.ZML file for an example of the new <PROJECT> tag that lets you specify additional files to be linked into the EXE.

You'll see the new DOCVIEW.EXE standalone documentation viewer in the Downloads area also. This is an example of an encrypted zApp program that has been linked into an EXE. In this case, the SQLITE.DLL database driver, and the pre-populated DOCVIEW.DB doc database is also linked into the EXE. When you run DOCVIEW.EXE, the ZXL file, SQLITE.DLL and DOCVIEW.DB files are extracted from the EXE, and the application is then executed. This is exactly how 3rd party developers can deploy their own zApp programs!

Included in the full version of zApp is the source code for DOCVIEW.ZML that you can feely modify just like any other zApp program to suit your own needs. Keep in mind that to run the text version of DocView.ZML that you can modify, you'll need the full copy of zApp. The free zAppLite can only execute the encrypted and unmodified DocView.ZXL file.

Enjoy this new release. It's been a lot of work to get to this point, but I'm really excited about the future possibilities for zApp.

Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 3:34 am

Oh yes, for now I'm just announcing this release in this forum. I'm not going to make any other public announcements for a couple of days. After a couple of days I'll post a big announcement to the Zuggsoft Home page to make it official. Just my way of saying thanks to everyone in this forum who helped (and is still helping) with the zApp testing!