Portico New and Noteworthy v0.8

This article describes the new and noteworthy changes present in version 0.8

HLA 1.3 DDM Support
The primary development activity for Portico v0.8 was the implementation of DDM support for HLA 1.3. All of the API calls listed in the "Data Distribution Management" section of the HLA 1.3 specification have now been implemented in both the Java and C++ interfaces.

C++ Interface Improvements
While developing Portico v0.8, a number of memory leaks and bugs were found and fixed in the C++ interface. This interface continues to grow more robust and stable as development goes on and the implementation in v0.8 is the strongest version yet.

The Portico GUI
While serving as a prisoner intern at Calytrix Technologies this past summer (Australian that is), Nick Staples braved the large and often smelly beasts that roam the Portico internals and began implementing a Portico GUI Plugin that shows live data about active federations. For more information about the Portico GUI plugin, see the Plugin Directory.

Native Mac OSX C++ Support
C++ interface support for Mac OS X has now been added and a separate download for this platform is available. The current C++ interface has been compiled on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and is targeted at Apple's Intel-based computers. At the moment, the current C++ libraries don't seem to work out of the box with Tiger (10.4), but we have had reports that the interface does happily compile and run on Tiger (if users wish to complete this task themselves).

Miscellaneous
Throughout the development process, a number of smaller new features were added and bugs fixed. For the full list of more than 70 features/bug fixes/improvements that went into Portico v0.8, see the ChangeLog.

SIMplicity Free for Portico Users
Although not strictly directly related to Portico, one other new and noteworthy event that occurred during Portico v0.8 development was the announcement by Calytrix Technologies that they decided to make SIMplicity Online available for free when using Portico. This is a fantastic resource for the wider simulation community and I would encourage all people to take a look at SIMplicity and make use of it if it suites their requirements.