We’ve had an eventful second quarter, including work on our Technical Steering Committee, Google Summer of Code projects, and many exciting new releases.
Technical Steering Committee
As announced in our blog post, the Technical Steering Committee elections are active now!
Google Summer of Code
As mentioned in our previous update, we have two projects in the works for Google Summer of Code. The projects can be viewed in our organization page through GSoC as well a recent blog post on the subject. On the July 15 Technology Working group meeting, the progress on the two projects was presented. See the full recording
More info on our Word Add-In project can be found on its wiki page. Aman, the GSoC intern working on the Word Add-In, presents his progress starting at 3m45s into the recording.
Patrik, the other talented GSoC intern, is working on translating Ergo smart contract logic to Webassembly. The new compiler backend will allow Accord contracts to be evaluated more securely and on a wide range of new platforms. For more details on the general goals of Webassembly we recommend to have a look at https://bytecodealliance.org/. Patrik is making good progress on the new backend and is planning to have a proof-of-concept Ergo-to-Webassembly compiler ready by the end of August. You can watch him presenting his progress starting at 36m15s into the recording.
Web Components
We have consolidated the three main user facing, front-end libraries – `cicero-ui`, `markdown-editor`, and `concerto-ui` – under one mono-repository. More on the specific benefits of this can be found in the initial release notes.
This has allowed consolidation of the demos into a Storybook which can be found on the Accord Project Netlify deployment. The Storybook allows for both existing and future users to tinker with and test out features in a sandbox environment.
Various additional functionalities such as drag and drop capabilities have been added.
New Releases
Cicero v0.21.0
This is a major new release of the Cicero templating system. This release includes an entirely new parsing and drafting engine built from the ground up with markdown in mind. It reduces the number of packages dependencies, and should result in better portability and performances.
Ergo v0.21.0
While this is listed as a major new release for Accord Project Ergo smart legal contract language, its main purpose is as support for the new version 0.12 of the markdown transform and the new version 0.21 of Cicero which include a fully revised parsing and drafting engine.
Markdown Transform v0.12.0
This is a major new release of the Markdown Transform library, which powers markdown-based templates and contracts, as well as its rich text editing components. It includes several new packages, better support for commonmark parsing, a new template parsing engine which replaces the one in Cicero, the ability to generate pdf documents, and more.
Open Call for Blog Posts
Accord Project has an ongoing open call for submissions and contributions to our blog. If you are interested in being featured on the AP blog, we are looking for more contributions for our blog and media outlets. If you would like to talk about a technical or non-technical topic within the AP ecosystem, your experience learning or working with AP, or something else, let us know! We would love to work with you and give exposure to and elevate your experiences.