Hi everyone,
Happy new year!
I just want to update everyone on what I've been working on, since I haven't
been communicating much lately. In the fall I continued working on my
CoreObject rewrite and ProjectDemo. Progress was a bit slower than I hoped, but
they are coming along.
As well, I have some ideas for the new year which I think will help us reach
our project's goals:
- I've been using github for personal projects lately, and I think it's pretty
awesome. I would like to use it for Étoilé development.. but as this is a big
change I can understand if you guys aren't keen on it. However, some of the
benefits I see are:
- git's fast access to history / log messages
- just being on github gives your code better exposure to people. For
instance, I put an early prototype of
my ObjectMerging code on github last summer, and soon after someone
starting 'watching' it for commits.
- being able to fork and commit to anyone's code without their
permission is really nice.
- the integrated wiki/ project website/ issue tracker / repository
browser seem to be top notch
- We still need a wiki :-(
- One of the things I think we should try is removing barriers from our
development which are slowing down the progress towards reaching a working
prototype of Étoilé, or in other words, avoid premature optimization. In
particular, I think at this stage we should be building Étoilé as a single
application, like I am attempting with ProjectDemo. Trying to build separate
applications and hook them together is just a distraction at this stage.
- A related project management observation I have made: we've been doing too
much framework development, and not enough work on an app to validate the
design of these frameworks. My experience with developing
ObjectMerging/ProjectDemo has been really positive so far, which is why I'm
proposing we try to work more along those lines.
- following on the last two points, I'm proposing that we make our 0.5.0
release a release of a single app – essentially a finished and polished version
of ProjectDemo. I think the sooner we can do this, the better, because it will
be a working demonstration of the goals of Étoilé - project and document
oriented vs app oriented, integrated revision control with persistent undo and
no saving, collaboration, etc. I think we should do this release without
EtoileUI, and plan to integrate EtoileUI for a follow up user-targeted release,
where we use EUI to add real compound document support.
- Regarding ProjectManager: Christopher, it looks like you've done some awesome
work lately putting together a nice compositing manager :-). I saw you were
doing some investigations into using EUI to build a project navigation sidebar.
IMHO we should keep ProjectManager as a 'dumb' compositing manager for now and
experiment with project management ideas in the ProjectDemo app. My hope is
that it will be easier to experiment that way.
- Switch to xmppframework (http://code.google.com/p/xmppframework/). I'll
volunteer to port this to GNUstep at some point. It looks very nice to me - BSD
licensed, actively developed, deployed in many real iphone/mac apps, and from
what I've seen the code looks good and it's more complete than XMPPKit. I don't
think we can justify maintaing and developing our own.
I hope that isn't too much philosophizing for one email - time to get back to
actual coding!
Regards,
Eric
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