Seed 0.8 released

[Robert Carr <carrr rpi edu>]

Today  I am  happy once  again  to announce  the release  of Seed  0.8
"Bringing It All Back Home".

Tarballs are available at
http://download.gnome.org/sources/seed/0.8/

For  those  not  familiar,  Seed  (http://live.gnome.org/Seed),  is  a
library  that bridges  WebKit's JavaScriptCore  interpreter,  with the
GNOME platform.  Using GObject-introspection, Seed  provides automatic
bindings around most GObject style  libraries. In addition Seed has an
API, which  in combination with  GObject-introspection can be  used to
easily  enable your  GObject application  to be  made  extensible with
JavaScript  (This is  currently realized  in the  Seed  extensions for
epiphany).  In  addition to  GNOME  libraries,  Seed  can also  access
OpenGL, a significant  portion of the POSIX API  (based on Python's OS
module)  and  various C  libraries,  such  as  cairo, libxml,  or  GNU
Readline.  Seed  also has  a fairly complete  set of (client  side for
now) DBus  bindings.  More modules can  easily be written  through a C
interface.

Bugs are welcome in the 'seed' component on GNOME bugzilla.

Seed has a documentation site at http://gnome.org/~racarr/seed

This  release  is the  first  to  depend  on 'gnome-js-common',  which
contains  modules and  bits  of  code/tests useful  for  both GJS  and
Seed. Some other highlights of this release include:

 * Cairo bindings.
 * Search path works with prefix.
 * Module documentation improved, and moved  to  docbook.
 * New  GtkBuilder  module  for automatic  signal connection.
 * A  few  leaks fixed.
 * Ability to  set non   GObject properties through JSON constructors
   improves design in many cases.

This release is a little hard to summarize, so I would suggest interested
individuals read the "full" changelog, below.

== Seed 0.8, "Bringing It All Back Home" (2009.05.27) ==
* Importer now supports constructing directory objects,
  to avoid manipulation of search path.
  Importer directory objects now support property enumeration.
* Fix small leak in GObject wrapper initialization.
  (and also simplify the process).
* GtkBuilder module to handle GtkBuilder automatic signal connection.
* *_init methods now take normal arrays (by value)
  in addition to the special Seed.argv array.
* GObject constructors (init methods) now take "self" as a parameter.
* Passing non gobject-properties to a GObject
  constructor will set the properties on the GObject wrapper.
* Module documentation rewritten in docbook, and builds one nice manual.
* New Cairo module, supports most of the cairo API, with
  automatic memory management and all that great stuff.
* Fix a reference count leak introduced in the last few releases.
  in some cases with non INITIALLY_UNOWNED objects.
* Some work on ClutterPad examples, and writing examples
  which live inside of it. (lots of fun to play with!,
  cairo example...fun spring example...ClutterBox2D)
* Working around a WebKit bug (which is actually fixed in SVN now),
  should prevent a crash that happened sometimes with C modules.
* Clutter animatev wrapper looks up property type wrapper now,
  so as to avoid having to pass [GObject.TYPE_FOO, bar]
* Implement some varargs functions which can be implemented
   on top of non vararg variants in JavaScript extensions.
* JSON stuff (stringify,parse) is now in gnome-js-common.
* Add seed_value_to_format to API, for converting an Array
  of SeedValue based on a format string.
* Install seed-debug.h so modules can make use of it.
* Search path now works in nonstandard prefix, default search path includes
  gnome-js-common moduledir (from pkgconfig).
* Support to/from Date objects to time_t.
* The usual round of example cleanup/improvements.