Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The magic of open source.

There are already *four* developers working on Boodle now: myself, Michael Hansen, Daniel Newton, and "Bot Builder."

For a project less than 2 (3?) weeks old, that is pretty rocking. It is also why I wanted any kind of Boo integration project to be open source as well: it is very easy to foster a community of developers. Daniel? He submitted like 3 patches to the list before he even joined the project. Sweet. It takes pressure off the rest of us if the load is distributed evenly.

Syntax colorization and code completion finally got threaded; I crafted a "saferunner" class out of the threaded UI code that Michael contributed. Its a lot more "Boo" without any sticky work-arounds, which is *TOTALLY AWESOME*. First class functions rock.

Boodle-dev, the mailing list, is getting pretty active now. Good stuff, this Boodle thing.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Pfheh, college.

Instead of spending time with my dear dear Boodle instead I was forced to write a 6-10 page paper critiquing someone else's critique of copyright ethics. What the hell?

Oh well, I managed to bang out two pages, and it stinks of desperation and boredom. I should stick to doing things I'm good at, but if I only did that, I would never get to program.

What's next for Boodle?

Here's my little TODO list:

  • Bug Mike to replace the textbox on the bottom of boodle with a tabbed interface that has console output, and a "task-list" where I can put errors. That will of course require a 'TaskManagerService' to do all the dirty under the hood work, which brings up the next point:
  • Why am I suffixing everything with "Service" ? I have like three -Service files I haven't committed to SVN yet simply because they're pretty worthless, but the fact that I do it is weird.
  • I have hazy thoughts of refactoring: a treeview showing each place the refactoring will occur, and a code block for each treeview to show the changes. Hopefully BooStyler will be able to colorize it properly. ;)
  • I need to optimize the styler; right now it re-styles on every keystroke. There is a property, EndStyled, that tells me where the last styled position was... but since I'm using the Boo Lexer (Boo.Lang.Parser), 'publ' would be marked as an IDentifier, though it can easily become 'public' - and thus a keyword - seconds later. I simply cannot ignore that, but I have not thought up any good strategies yet. I have considered simply re-styling anything marked as an "identifier" each keystroke instead; that might be more efficient. I should probably look to see what other people are doing, but won't.
  • Boodle's coming to the point where it can easily replace Boo Explorer. This is good, and was my original goal in the first place. ;) There is still much more to do after that point, though.
  • I need someone with a better eye for colors than me to pick out some sane colors for syntax colorization.
  • Don't let BooStyler get too muddled; in the future I'm going to want it to mark those mysterious 'ID's as fields, types, etc.
  • I still haven't figured out how to make wxStyledTextCtrl bitmasks and stuff. Its just not something I do on a day-to-day level... and am mildly suprised they exposed implementation-level details in an API, but whatever - it wraps C/++ code, what can I expect?
*mumble mumble* Once I turn in this stupid paper I can get back to rocking.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Like a melding of the minds...


Boodle's coming together quite nicely.

You can't see it, but there's a neat firefox-esque "find" bar that pops up when you ctrl-f.

You can jam over to The Boodle Project Page and grab a SVN copy if you're desperate, but its still got a boat-load of bugs lurking, plus a like of spaghetti code. (Make it work, then make it work fast).

Yes, those colors *need* to be changed. =D

Update:
Careful, the setup exe is out of date - we've made quite a bit of progress in the past four days. ;)

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Boodle on Novell Forge.

Boodle has a home on Novell Forge now thanks to their awesome hosting with SVN access.

There's already a few SVN commits and an installer (!), because Mike Hansen is apparently one very busy dude. For those of you not engrossed in reading the comments section, I'm working with him on Boodle. He's very good at compositing the UI elements together in a fashion that doesn't suck -- too bad my code isn't as elegant. ;)

I just checked in very raw code completion / compiling / running of single files. Still haven't found a way to work with the StyledTextCtrl yet, though, without dipping into C - something I don't wanna do. At all. Ever. (colorize me lazy). Not sure how to handle the situation yet.

*Update: made link point to right project, sorry. ^.^