Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The plugin manager

I am starting to make things work in the plugins manager of XPontus XML Editor.

The plugins metadata have the following attributes for now:
  • author
  • contributors
  • date
  • version
  • homepage
  • license
  • description, etc.
This will allow full text search of the plugins using Apache Lucene.

When a plugin is added, the plugin is extracted in the XPontus plugins directory. The plugin descriptor is later indexed in a thread.

Here is a screenshot of the plugins manager.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Everything is going smooth

I am working on XPontus' user settings. Most of them are working now. It is taking me forever to code it. Dealing with lots of user settings is a huge pain.

I choose not to use my fatal combo(JGoodies Bindings + XStream) all the time. Using both a good binding framework and a good serialization framework makes the hard work easy. But when you change your model classes then your serialization data is useless. You have to delete them all and to store them again. Therefore the user lose all his saved settings. However if you use simple text files(xml, properties file), you can easily discard deprecated data, restore it, etc. The counterpart is that it will take you time to code it all.

Here is my schedule :
- Finish the user settings Monday
- Have a functional plugins browser(Friday)
- Fix as many bugs as possible in the code completion plugins (saturday)
- Test all the software features (Sunday)
- Make an official release date of the 1.0.0-pre1_alpha1 version

There will be 3 releases 1.0.0_pre1_alpha branch I guess. I plan to release a new alpha every month. After 3 months, xpontus 1.0.0-pre1 shall become the stable release.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The hard work is done!

I have been trying to release XPontus XML Editor for the last few months. There are now less features missing. Most bugs have been fixed, new bugs arrived too :-(.

I'll be working on the plugins installer and the user settings. I hope I'll be done with that at the end of the week.

The only thing left after that will be working on an intelligent and decent code completion with caching support.

I plan to move to OSGI architecture for plugins when the final 1.0.0 release is ready. This will involve some code rewriting. But it shouldn't be major if I get a good understanding on OSGI. The only thing that is bugging me is Java Web Start deployment with OSGI and the java security manager. I expect to see lots of errors like "File read permission denied..."

Friday, February 08, 2008

Getting ready to release

Some friends are helping me test the upcoming snapshot release of XPontus. I had some nice comments and I am fixing bugs. Some critical issues affecting the current release are being resolved. Some features present in the stable release are still missing in the snapshot release.

To those who reported bugs on the sourceforge tracker "I am working on that..."

Sunday, February 03, 2008

XPontus has a new look

I often heard : "is it Eclipse? It sure look like Eclipse..."

I borrowed some icons here and there without bothering about license stuff. The new icons are from gartoon gnome icon theme mostly.

Working on User's settings

The plugins settings dialog of XPontus is almost done. I wrote simple interfaces to allow plugins to register some configuration options.