Framework EDI (FREDI) is now in Alpha. All changes made to
FREDI in this version were internal. To reach this phase in the
development, a stable version with the following changes
had to be completed.
Remove ActiveX/COM dependence. The previous version
of FREDI had to load ActiveX/COM components for getting information
required in translating EDI documents, a feature that this version
no longer requires. In particular, FREDI had to load COM
components to get Standard Exchange Format (SEF) guidelines, EDI
semantic descriptions, and EDI standards version libraries, without
which it would fail to operate. The capability to parse SEF
documents is now built in; and the capability to store the EDI
standards database and to process it has also been built in.
These undertook the bulk of the changes, and unfortunately,
incorporating these changes resulted in degrading the overall
performance of this version. FREDI development continues to
focus on improving the performance of this version over the previous
version.
Simplify Installation. Because of the changes above,
there are no more separate COM components to be installed with this
version of FREDI, simplifying installation of the product. See
Configuring Framework EDI.
Simplify .NET programming. This version now improves
developer experience by simplifying the coding requirements in the
.NET environment. In the previous version of FREDI, special
programming considerations were required to overcome the
non-deterministic behavior of .NETs garbage collector (See Programming with Framework EDI .NET Hybrid),
which are no longer required in this version. However, this
alpha version is 100% backward compatible, and this version should
continue to work on existing code programmed for the previous
version 5.6.
Globalization. To prepare the product for future
capabilities in processing international documents, the code has
been re-written to accommodate UNICODE characters.
