Welcome to Escher!

Introduction

Escher stands for Eiffel schema evolution support and aims at integrating support for class schema evolution into the EiffelStudio IDE.
Escher is made of two independent parts, the EiffelStudio tool and the serialization library.

The EiffelStudio Tool

The EiffelStudio Tool introduces and manages version handling of a software project over time and supports schema evolution by generating the code necessary for the underlying serialization library to work at best. The tool will enable, with a few mouse clicks, the following:

• Easy release and distribution of the application code.
• Ad hoc conversion functions across different class versions.
• Creation of a customized serialized form.

For more information please have a look at the comprehensive tutorial.

The Serialization Library

The Serialization Library contains the classes used for serialization and de-serialization. Objects are saved into files using a simple, human-readable encoding format. In addition, it handles schema evolution across different class versions. For more information please have a look at the documentation.

How to get it

To try out Escher on Windows you have to follow the following instructions:

1. Download the file eve63_windows.zip from the download page
2. Set the following system variables:
   • ISE_EIFFEL to the path where you unzipped the file eve63_windows.zip, for example C:\eve63_windows
   • ISE_C_COMPILER to "msc" (no quotes)
   • ISE_PLATFORM to "windows" (no quotes)
   • ISE_LIBRARY to "%ISE_EIFFEL%" (no quotes)
3. Go to eve63_windows\studio\specs\windows\bin
4. Open "estudio" executable

Escher is modular. If you are only interested in the (de)serialization library you can get it from:

http://escher.origo.ethz.ch/download This includes the documentation in pdf format