WiSeSLAp / News: Recent posts

Released CairoSDL with the original source, our FreePascal bindings and a pre-compiled Windows(TM) DLL for those who don't have a C build environment under Windows.

We have set up our own ROBODoc customizations and have started documenting the API. Results can be checked in HTML and PDF Format:
http://www.a-fon.org/wiseslap/robodoc/html/masterindex.html
http://www.a-fon.org/wiseslap/robodoc/latex/wiseslap.pdf

Not much at the moment, but we'll keep working on it.

We are slightly disappointed with the way sourceforge supports Git. Due to shortcomings in SVN, we moved to Git, only to find out that commits don't show up on the SF summary page, and that the GitConnector plugin for trac cannot be enabled. This is not good enough!

We have started releasing pre-installed VMWare machines based on Zenwalk (currently 6.2b). They include pre-compiled DirectFB binaries in the most up-to-date version (available in almost no standard GNU/Linux distribution) and re-compiled Cairo binaries with DirectFB support. Downloadable via BitTorrent or directly.

From 09/09/01 until 09/09/06 we're going to concentrate all our powers on WiSeSLAp in a unique coding retreat, the WiSeSLAp Summoner Of Code 09 (SnOC09). Unpaid. We hope to get very close to finishing the Baklava-alpha milestone. Stay tuned for progress reports.

Even though a tarball was planned to be delivered on baklava-devel milestone completion, we have decided to delay it. There is some cleanup to do, and some major bugs should be fixed before anyone downloads an official tarball. Within the next 2(?) months, we will move to /trunk and then release a tarball.

We have reached our target for baklava-devel only a few days late. It is probably still not usable for much besides compiling the demo application (which just displays some widgets), so we are hesitant to put up a tarball. Maybe later.
In the meantime, we are already progressing towards baklava-alpha, which will include some more advanced and special widgets (mainly a class of overlay widgets for drop downs and "context menues", splined line edit, waveform display, multi-line text box) and an abstraction of graphical/event handling backends (SDL and DirectFB for a start).

There is now a tar ball beta release of the DirectFB 1.3.1 bindings for FreePascal. Included is one sample application which blits an image, does some input processing, and at the end lists your h/w accel capabilities.

Please report bugs and stuff.

After spending a few hours on regex scripts to speed up my DirectFB header translations, they are complete (in an alpha-alpha sense). The simple demo (drawing the horizontal line before exiting) works, however.

Yes, we, too, cannot believe what we are achieving with this project in our spare time. We intend to continue baffling ourselves completely.

A splendid Sunday afternoon to everyone!

Cheers,
Roland

We are now nearing the first milestone. The last widgets are being patched up by M. Karg, while I am working on code which allows easy customizing of the look of Wsl applications.

Also, I have started DirectFB 1.3 bindings. Since the performance of SDL is suboptimal in certain parts, we want to have an (exclusive or optional) DirectFB backend soon. The header files are quite large, though. Might take time.... read more

It shows the progress in simple widget design for all those who don't want to compile from SVN. It's looking nicer from day to day!

We are now using a Sourceforge-hosted trac installation for basically everything (wiki, tickets, milestoning, etc.) Go to http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/wiseslap/ and check the milestones/tickets for tight updates on our progress. Note that all problems which were solved before last week were of course not opened as tickets, so the completion percentage of the milestone Baklava-devel is actually much higher than shown.

baklava.pas compiles again (cf. 'devel' branch). wslPrimitves was completed for the first ten widgets. Besides doing som experiments with SDL pixel arrays in shared memory (for the distant future, when wslServer comes to live), we are now doing research on wslLayout, the high level font/text rendering component. As an obvious choice, Pango has been suggested as the underlying technology. Nothing has been decided yet, though.

We have combined recent efforts and progress and moved all files to our first official devel branch: /devel/baklava in SVN. It will take about 2 days to clean up and make things compile again. We're incl. a simple Makefile and a demo application called Baklava.

http://pascalportaudio.sourceforge.net has a release of our bindings to PortAudio. The WslAudio framework might be built on it.

Things are going well. We are developing a base class hierarchy and a renderer for basic widgets. It does buttons, clicking, dragging and dropping, and then some.

Also, work on a Cairo-based pre-renderer of widget graphics has begun. We have created bindings for cairosdl, a nice little glue library to safely put Cairo-generated content on SDL surfaces.

Work has started again after a period of stagnation and reconsideration. We will open a wiki for all conceptual work, and we are actively coding! Coding is now mainly done in Pascal.

We move to deloper blogs for news and in-depth reflections about the development process. Roland Schaefer's blog is here:
http://www.a-fon.org/codeslapper

hi everyone,

1. at the moment we're delaying the full implementation of the object hierarchy for wiseslap -- we're just too busy with non-oss stuff at the moment. also, work on the renderer has been stalled. expect commits after the SnoC I in august.

2. however, we have started a discussion whether we should provide a directFB backend for wiseslap (http://directfb.org) right from the beginning. the advantages of being able to go without an X server would be immense, at least for embedded applications. anyone who has an opinion on the matter, please come forward!... read more

Work was delayed by some basic decisions which have to be made. After a closer inspection of the Xt (Intrinsics) Toolkit, we decided to go without it (plain Xlib).

On the design side, final SVGs of visible widgets are being prepared. They will be uploaded in one chunk in March.

Cheers!
RS

From now on, we are going to post a status report once around the middle of every month, and once at the end. We might move to a blog system soon.

Ok, we're alive and working on the renderer (part of the Xlib abstraction). After the renderer, the WSL event handling will be implemented to complete Xlib abstraction and allowing free development of the WSL widget classes.

As it seems, a preliminary (technical) specification of the widget classes will be in the /spec SVN directory by the end of April 2007. Code uploads will start once the threading model of the renderer has been implemented, maybe also in April 2007.... read more

We're heavily working on design specs. Most work is currently being done under the HuMuS banner, though. Go to http://humus.sourceforge.net to get first visual impressions of a WiSe SLAp application.

In the meantime, some pre-SVN coding is being done by M. Karg. E.g., the palette management.

We have as of today started the official discussion of the functionality and specs of WiSe SLAp. We use the SVN server (/specs) to work on the TeX and SVG files.