After creating and maintaining the RBloomberg package for many years, Robert
Sams has decided to hand over maintenance of the package to me. The
RBloomberg package is a staple of daily working life for many of us, and I
for one owe Robert Sams a debt of gratitude for his work in creating and
maintaining this very useful library.

There is a lot of work being done on RBloomberg in preparation for an
upcoming 0.3 release. With the new Version 3 Bloomberg Desktop API, there
are some interesting new options for connecting to Bloomberg. Data is now
available via C, C++, .NET and Java as well as the existing COM interface.
It is my intention to develop wrappers for both the Java and C interfaces
within RBloomberg. I have already begun to develop the Java interface (using
rJava) and so this should be available relatively soon, hopefully by the end
of the year. The C interface will take a little longer.

With regard to the COM interface, RBloomberg has been extensively rewritten
to make its internals simpler, and to allow a choice of COM server. In
addition to RDCOMClient, there is now support for rcom. Unfortunately, rcom
is not able to cope with bulk data fields from Bloomberg, such as
INDX_MEMBERS. Hopefully this restriction will be removed in future. In the
mean time, it would be worth trying rcom if you are trying to use RBloomberg
on a machine without admin privileges. I have heard reports that rcom is
more suitable than RDCOMClient for this scenario, although I have not tested
this myself.

If you would like to help test the 0.2-x development versions, then they are
available from a new website at http://bloombergapi.com/rbloomberg. A number
of new features are available (compared with the CRAN version), such as
support for overrides. There is also the start of a PDF user guide. There
are some changes to the API, so I wouldn't recommend installing 0.2 unless
you are the early adopter type and it is definitely not ready for production
use yet. I'm very keen to receive feedback, bug reports, feature requests
and such via launchpad or via email. The launchpad site where you can report
bugs etc. is here:

https://launchpad.net/rbloomberg

If you are interested in contributing, I'd be delighted to hear from you,
particularly with regard to the C or Java APIs.

Regards,
Ana Nelson

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