So I know I promised at Thanksgiving an update on the state of things. Well I lied/got busy. Sorry; these things happen. The past few months have been a whirlwind. So here’s a brief personal update before I talk about software.
In May 2009 the Mac port of Chromium (the open source project that Google uses for their Chrome browser) was starting to gear up. I’d been interested in working on a Mac browser project for a while; but Firefox’s code seemed beastly and I never have been a fan of XUL. Safari is great, but it isn’t open source. Enter Chromium: an open-source, truly native, WebKit-based browser. Consider it love at first sight. Fast forward 12 patches and four months later to August when I am nominated and made a committer. My work has all involved bridging the cross-platform C++ model (as in MVC) to Objective-C/Cocoa land. I wrote the Mac the page info window, history menu, cookie manager, font and language settings, download settings, and added favicons throughout various parts of the UI. Now, present day. Last week Google offered me an internship position in Manhattan. I’m thrilled at the opportunity and am excited to start work there in May with such smart, interesting, and talented people. I expect to learn a lot!
So now let’s talk software.
Bugdar
Last time I wrote about the future of Bugdar 2, I posted a link to a list of phases development that would occur. The original plan was to create 1.3 as a stepping stone to 2.0. That line of development has since been abandoned. Instead, I decided to greenfield the project. There were many reasons for doing this; but here are the two big ones:
1. I have a better, more focused vision of what I want Bugdar 2 to be. When writing Bugdar 1, I didn’t have a clear goal of what I wanted – there was no philosophy to the design, I was merely thinking “copy Bugzilla, but do it better”. Overall, I think I was successful with this. But this is not Bugdar 2, at all. Bugdar 2 will be a refined, incredibly flexible system that I am excited to share with you. But because the two projects will be so different, trying to create a large, temporary scaffolding system (version 1.3) was extremely time consuming and kludgey.
2. ISSO. Originally dubbed the “Iris Studios Shared Objects” framework. This thing is ancient. The first version dates back to when I was a rather n00b PHPer. The first commit was from 12 January 2005! Since that time I’ve had a lot more development experience and completed a Minor in Computer Science. A better, more-efficient architecture could be devised.
I wrote an entirely new PHP framework (that will require PHP 5.3+) that is a bare-minimum, no-frills framework. I call this Phalanx and the code is currently available on Github; it is licensed under the GPL version 3. Phalanx is event-driven. Rather than writing another MVC framework, I decided to look at the problem of web frameworks through the lens of functional programming. The problem with MVC on the web is the lack of state; HTTP is not persistent. Functional programming focuses more on inputs and outputs (and the transformations between them), which is how Phalanx works. Each Event class defines a set of inputs that it accepts and the outputs it will return. This also makes unit testing much more clear-cut. I won’t get into further details here, though. That’s for another post.
So before I could start moving again on Bugdar, I had to write this new framework. That took a matter of months (July - January). But I’m now back on Bugdar. Phalanx makes development really fast, and in the past two days I’ve implemented the basic user system, a preliminary Auth2 API, and initial submission and listing of bug reports. I’ve posted a new roadmap for Bugdar 2.
MacGDBp
I’ve been refactoring and cleaning up MacGDBp’s code over the past few months. It’s also been accumulating various fixes for non-critical bugs. I’d also like to re-tackle the socket/network layer for 1.4, as I tried and failed to improve this in 1.3. You can probably expect this update before Spring.
Site Redesign
I’m also working on redesign the Blue Static site. It really hasn’t changed since 2006 (insert the ‘learned a lot’ bit here) and it’s time. I’m not very far on this, yet.
Wow that’s a lot. More in the next few days. UI mocks to come.
I’m pleased to announce MacGDBp 1.3. This release features a new tool that allows you inspect values in the variables list via a HUD (screenshot below). This inspector will allow you to see long strings and to select/copy text values. To access this feature, go to Window → Inspector (Shift+Cmd+I). The currently-selected variable (which now, in 1.3, remembers itself across debugger stepping) will have its full value displayed in the HUD window.
Under the hood, there are two significant changes. The first is a rewrite of the receiving side of the socket layer (it now precisely uses the message length when buffering memory), which should eliminate the “buffer is incomplete” errors that occasionally popped up. The second is that the PHP stack will no longer be managed internally. After every debugger step, the entire stack will be now re-created because Xdebug proved to be unpredictable for keeping in sync with an internal state. Debugger actions may now seem a little less snappy, but I think accuracy is more important than speed here. In 1.4 I’m going to use a caching mechanism that will speed up performance by reducing network access.
This release also features a bunch of bug fixes, a couple of which would cause the debugger display to not work under certain circumstances. As always, the change log and commit log have all the details on the release.
I cannot commit to a web browser. I like Firefox because I think it provides options (via extensions) and the awesome bar is, in fact, awesome. Safari however provides better platform aesthetic and WebKit is a faster rendering engine.
But besides that, I noticed recently that Firefox feels a little “cramped” after using Safari 4 beta. And this is the reason why:
I’m amazed at what 24 pixels can do.
Mac users interested in Google Chrome can now try out the latest pre-alpha development version. I have compiled the source tree and the binary can be found here. I’ll be rebuilding and posting the build roughly once a week.
As it says on the page, these builds are unstable and should only be used to see how development is progressing. I will not support these builds and (I’m assuming) neither will the Google team. That being said, enjoy.
I have just finished all major work on MacGDBp. All the v1.0 features have been added and there are no existing issues (that I know about). I’m going to put it through a few days of dog-food testing, but expect a release sometime this weekend or very early next week.
Along with testing, all the release materials still need to be prepped. Those include the website, help/documentation information, and marketing/PR. So once those are finished, all systems are go.
See you soon!