thelonelycoder
Part of the Furniture
I was expecting your question to eventually be asked. Let me lay out to you where I stand now.@thelonelycoder, any update on AB4?
Recent developments in my life mean I will have significantly less time available to spend on development and support for AB-Solution in the future. The changes are good for me in every aspect except the one you are inquiring about.
With the current version of AB-Solution, the support part is relatively small, especially with other users giving advice or offering their view. I very much appreciate these responses and thank everyone brave enough to pipe in where they can.
That said, it's clear that AB-Solution 3.11.1 is very stable, has none or almost no bugs and is in use on thousands of routers worldwide, with an daily increasing user base.
You can see where this is going. But I can set your mind at rest.
My primary goal for AB 4 is to be as stable as AB 3.x is now.
That can be achieved if I would just forget about the other reasons why AB 4 is developed and simply add the new features to the existing code base and release it as 4.0.
That won't happen for similar reasons that RMerlin drops the 380.x code base and exclusively works with the new 382/384, aka New Generation code.
AB 4, or NG (!) is a radical rewrite of all functions offered by AB 3.x. Version 4 runs on all routers under my control and to the untrained eye looks the same as a v3.x installation when looking at the terminal menu.
You have seen the teaser screenshots I posted and the pictures hardly convey what changed underneath. I can't produce a code comparison screenshot for the simple reason that there's nothing to compare to.
AB 3 and 4 have almost nothing in common code wise except its application name. But I digress.
For AB 4 I have decided that I will break up the intended goals into separate development stages and subsequently release new versions when a new feature is complete.
The AB web UI is one major goal to be pushed back into a later release for the reason that it is potentially the source of most problems and conflicts I see. I could elaborate on that but let's just say that automatically installing a web server on a great variety of devices with an ever greater variety of services the user decided to install is a challenge of its own. I use lighttpd and it works great but I see several conflicts at the moment with existing user installations.
So, the new primary goal is to release AB 4 with the same features that AB 3 currently offers, on a completely new code base. I'm very far into it, all features are converted to the new code base and work as they should.
I would confidently release the current development code right away if the user base of AB were only a handful installations. But that is not the case and I want to make sure 4.0 runs as stable as possible when released.
To finally answer the question: At the moment I have no clear plan when a beta version will be available.
Much of it depends on what my mentioned future professional workload will be.
I can promise this: It will be worth the wait.