Blog

Jun

13

2014

Cylon 0.15.0 is Out!

by Andrew Stewart

Cylon 0.15.0 has just been released, as part of our run-up to 1.0.0. It has a number of small changes, mainly effecting how modules are written. Don't worry, there's still a lot of changes for end-users as well!

Here's a overview of the changes, but if you want to see more check out the compare view on GitHub.

• Better halting: - Halting Cylon programs with Ctrl-C should now be more reliable, with a forced quit if the program can't gracefully stop within a couple seconds.

• Removed 'connect' and 'start' events from Adaptors/Drivers: - due to how our startup works, by the time listeners could be set up for these events they were already fired.

• Cleaner startup: - we now lean more on the async module to make sure Robot startup is as simple and efficient as possible.

• Have some fun: - you can now optionally pass a play block when creating a Robot, rather than work. Internally, they behave the same, but all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

• Number#fromScale update: - the fromScale extension to Number will now cap results to the top or bottom of the scale.

• API Refactors: - our API has been updated to use Express 4 (previously we were using 3.5). Additionally, several catch-all routes have been replaced by middleware. Overall, this substancially downsizes the dependency tree for Cylon.

• Commands is now an array, not a function: - previously, Adaptor/Driver #commands was a function that returned an array. For 0.15.0, we've eschewed that in favor of just directly accessing an array.

• find{Robot,RobotConnection,RobotDevice} gone: - we removed these previously used convenience methods from Cylon, in favor of manual lookup. To go with this change, Cylon.robots is now an object, not an array. Robots created with Cylon.robot are stored in this object, using their name as a key.

• Utils (mostly) removed from global namespace: - Most of the utility functions have been removed from the global namespace, with the exceptions of every, after, and constantly, as well as the extensions to Number we provide (seconds, fromScale, etc.). All utilities can still be found under the Cylon.Utils namespace.

Contributors

A huge thanks to our contributors who made this release possible. And a special thanks to new contributors Andrew Nesbitt, Chris Boette, and Fábio Franco Uechi!

Documentation

We're constantly updating the Cylon docs to keep them up-to-date. You can find the latest info on the docs page.

Issues

If you find any issues with Cylon, please let us know! We try to be on IRC (#cylon on freenode) as much as possible, but if we're not around leave us a GitHub issue and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.