AutoREALM go for wx/Widgets

Here's the last news and state of evolution of coding for AutoREALM...
It only concerns of a coding port under a library tool which permits
easy cross-platform development and compilation on all sort of
Operating Systems. For more information, http://www.wxwidgets.org

The authors of this email are on the yahoogroup AutoREALM:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AutoREALM if you want to contact them.
No futur spammed addresses will be mentioned here.

Subject: Re: [AutoREALM] wxWidgets port of AutoREALM

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 12:56:30PM -0000, zulithe (no spammed address
here) wrote:
> I heard on another forum about a person (or a group?) that is porting
> AutoREALM to wxwidgets. Is there any news on this, or a site where
> more information can be gathered?

There's no place for news, though I'll gladly talk about it. I'm the
main person doing the porting work to wxWidgets. The reason for the lack
of news, though, is simple: There's not much by way of news.

AutoRealm, the Delphi version, is about 50,000 lines of code intertwined
with itself (several circular dependencies have been found already). The
main thrust of the porting work is attempting to convert the pascal into
C++ directly where possible, and rewriting whatever else has to be,
making sure to document as much as possible along the way.

One thing that has been ported to wxWidgets successfully is the forms.
They're done using XRC files (XML ResourCe), which is a nice, platform
independent way of describing the windows. All graphics have been
converted to .png files, and overall, they look fairly decent.

So, where are things right now? A small shell for the main form has been
written. It compiles and runs, bringing up the ever familiar AutoRealm
main window. A couple of the minor buttons work (fill pattern, color
buttons). A menu item or two (notably File->Exit and Help->About).

As to what's being done right now... there are several classes which act
as the main "meat" of AutoRealm, if you will, along with some fairly
important utility routines. These are being actively ported, and will be
finished sometime soon. Once those are done, it is hoped that the
remainder of the forms/units will be comparatively easy, allowing me to
reach a full alpha state by sometime in March.

Now, what do I consider to be alpha, beta, and release works?

Alpha: First pass over all code is completed. Many todo items
identified, but not yet worked on. User documentation has not been
examined at this time at all.

Beta: All todo items completed, User documentation completed. Basically,
this is (to me) what is coming to be known as "Preview Release" or
"Release Candidate". Possibly some still known bugs being worked on.

Release: No known bugs, everything completed. Only things which may be
missing will be translations to other languages.

When do I hope to release? I'm making use of some features in the
wxWidgets toolkit which are in the development version only. As a
result, I can't do a release until after the wxWidgets toolkit has been
released at version 2.6.0. That is planned for April, 2005. After that
release, I need to make sure that everything compiles, runs, and tests
cleanly, so allow up to another month. Basically, I'm aiming for May,
2005 for release of AutoRealm/wxWidgets.

An important note about this version: This version will NOT include new
features. This version is nothing but the port to C++/wxWidgets, and is
(as much as possible) a line by line port.

The intent is that the next version will be a major code cleanup, and
also allow for new features to be put in. After that, who knows where it
will go? I'm not going to try and guess.

Of course, I'm always happy to receive any help that can be given. If
you're a coder, let me know, and I'll help you get set up to work on the
codebase. If you're a translator, I can use that, too. If you just want
to make sure that everything has the correct keyboard shortcuts, I can
even help you get set up to do that. I promise, I won't turn down any
help :)

Wow, lots more typing than I thought I would do. Hope I didn't drown you
with too much information.

--
Michael J. Pedersen
(no addresses spammed here too)