CO-LaN recommends that COBIA based applications are shipped with the latest COBIA Runtime. Release 1.2.0.12 contains several fixes/enhancements to the COBIA run-time and to the COBIA client headers. COBIA is targeting multiple platforms and fixes apply to issues found both on Linux and Windows platforms.
The distribution is made of three elements:
- a zipped file that contains merge modules that are used in 3rd-party installation packages to install COBIA Runtime (also known as COBIA Core),
- an installation package of these merge modules for 64-bit machines (to be used to repair an installation of the merge modules made by other means),
- an installation package of COBIA Software Development Kit (SDK).
COBIA Runtime can be freely used and redistributed. COBIA Runtime consists of middleware components that will be installed on the end-user’s computer during installation of COBIA-based Process Modelling Environments (PMEs) and Process Modelling Components (PMCs) developed by a software provider. The COBIA Runtime is intended to be distributed with and utilized by third-party software.
The COBIA Software Development Kit (SDK) is provided for free as a stand-alone installation package which distributes a set of components and tools that are used by a software developer to create software that utilizes COBIA as the middleware for CAPE-OPEN interoperability. The SDK includes code generators to help create the source code of interfaces developed from the CAPE-OPEN Interface Definition Language (IDL) specifically adapted to COBIA. The SDK installer installs COBIA Runtime as well.
Development and maintenance of COBIA is conducted by AmsterCHEM for CO-LaN.
Please refer to the list of tickets fixed by version 1.2.0.12. Find hereafter explanations for the most relevant support tickets that are resolved by this release:
- Ticket 171: enumerator of COBIA registered PMCs was crashing when faced with inconsistent information in Windows registry.
- Ticket 172: non-CAPE-OPEN interfaces were not authorized by COMBIA to raise CAPE-OPEN errors. Raising CAPE-OPEN errors even in non CAPE-OPEN interfaces is rather common in an application implementing CAPE-OPEN interfaces. COMBIA now allows for CAPE-OPEN errors to be raised by non-CAPE-OPEN interfaces and picks up on the error description.
- Ticket 173: COM system errors, such as E_POINTER, E_FAIL, are now mapped to COBIA system errors such as COBIAERR_CriticalError and COBIAERR_NullPointer. As an example application, it allows the CAPE-OPEN Test Suite to test that CAPE_OPEN errors are raised instead of system errors, where expected.
- Ticket 174: particularly during installation, cobiaRegister (or wCobiaRegister) typically fails with the laconic message “CAPE-OPEN initialization fails”. Better textual error messages are now in place about why COBIA fails – e.g. report on failure to load the COBIA core DLL (with path to the DLL and error code), report on failure to load any of the function pointers, etc…
- Ticket 175: wrappers did not raise system errors. The code generation interface adapters are now fixed and the fixed code generation is applied to the client header files.
- Ticket 176: COBIA namespace in generated adapter code was not always correct, leading possibly to either too many or too few occurrences of COBIA:: in the generated adapter code.
- Ticket 177: if a registry (writer-) key is queried for a named subkey, and the subkey exists, the original key was returned erroneously, instead of the subkey. This bug resulted in registration/unregistration issues.
CO-LaN encourages all software developers to use version 1.2.0.12.
Previous release was version 1.2.0.11 released on December 16, 2022. Version 1.2.0.11 was downloaded 96 times for the SDK installer, 77 times for the archive of runtime merge modules, and 77 times for the runtime installer since it was made available.
Questions on COBIA 1.2 can be posted on the CAPE-OPEN forum dedicated to COBIA.