Dear Community,

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Next Scripting
Framework (NSF) 2.5.0. This release makes NSF, NX, and XOTcl support
Tcl 9 and its features. The release also marks the 25th anniversary of
XOTcl, the predecessor of NX and one of the parents of TclOO. In May
1999, the first paper on XOTcl was presented at the 5th USENIX
Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS '99):

Gustaf Neumann & Uwe Zdun: Filters as a Language Support for Design
Patterns in Object-Oriented Scripting Languages, in: Proc. of
COOTS'99, San Diego, California, USA, May, 1999, URL:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/coots99/full_papers/neumann/neumann.pdf

Further changes are mostly perfective improvements in terms of
bug fixes.  See below for the details.

Diff stats since 2.4.0:

    ...

Major changes relative to 2.4.0 are: NSF now compiles and runs with
Tcl 9 as released. This way, NSF/NX/XOTcl can be used with the Tcl
8.5, Tcl 8.6, and Tcl 9 on Linux, Windows, and macOS.  One can see the
results of the compilations and test runs on

    https://github.com/nm-wu/nsf/actions
    https://ci.appveyor.com/project/mrcalvin/nsf-2ylk0/history

Hint: As for Tcl 8.5, NSF is only tested with (unreleased) Tcl 8.5
revisions taken from `core-8-5-branch` at https://core.tcl-lang.org/tcl/.

Selected changes worth mentioning:

- Maintenance & bug fixes:

  * Tcl 9: Refcounting
  * Tcl 9: file home vs. ~

- NSF:

  * ::nsf::proc now supports "-returns"
  * ::nsf::parseargs now honours "required" properly

- NX:

  * "info consts":

    nx::Object create o {
	      #
	      # Create a "const" instance variable
	      #
	      const :x 1
	      set :y 2
	      # ...
     }
     puts [o info consts]
     puts [o info vars]	

- XOTcl:

  * ...

- MongoDB:

  * New proc: ::mongo::oid::gettimestamp

- Documentation:

  * ...

The detailed changelog is available at
https://next-scripting.org/xowiki/download/file/ChangeLog-2.4.0-2.5.0.log

The Next Scripting Framework 2.5.0 (containing NX 2.5.0 and XOTcl
2.5.0) can be obtained from https://next-scripting.org/. Please report
issues and wishes by opening a ticket at
https://sourceforge.net/p/next-scripting/tickets/.

Best regards
- Gustaf Neumann
- Stefan Sobernig