Greetings,
Well, a week has gone by since the last report. What have I done in
the last week?
As I said before, I am basically starting from scratch. The existing
Active4D code base is basically 7 years old. It's a miracle it runs at
all under Leopard.
In addition to rewriting everything to use Unicode throughout, I have
to update all of my calls to the operating system to use Mac OS X
(instead of MacOS 9) interfaces, and on Windows I have to substitute
the usage of the Altura Mac2Win library with native Windows interfaces.
Oh yeah, another little twist is that I used to write and compile for
both Mac and Windows on CodeWarrior. Now Mac development is in Xcode
(which I like much better), and Windows testing/tweaking is done in
Visual Studio (which I hate).
To top it all off, to support v11 fully, I have to create a separate
version for v11 and 4D 2004. So my coding and testing matrix is much
more complex, and thus time-consuming.
Finally, I have decided to release my whiz-bang C++ plugin framework
to the world when I am done with Active4D v11, which led me to start
using Doxygen to document my code, which is of course a Good Thing all
around, since the framework is pretty big and I need a good reference
myself, but it also means I am spending more time documenting.
This past week I have been working on a cross-platform Path class that
takes care of the nasty aspects of converting filesystem paths between
platform and Posix (URL) format. The coding is basically done, now I'm
documenting and I have to write a good test suite to make sure every
line of code is tested.
That's my way -- create solid building blocks that are thoroughly
tested, then build on that. It's slow at first, but once the building
blocks are in place development is much faster than would otherwise be
the case, and the end product is much more reliable.
So the bottom line is the same as last time -- sorry to keep everyone
waiting, but patience is a virtue!
Regards,
Aparajita
www.aparajitaworld.com
"If you dare to fail, you are bound to succeed."
- Sri Chinmoy | www.srichinmoy.org
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