Saturday, February 28, 2009

Paladin can Bootstrap Itself Now

Up until now, it's been possible to build Paladin using Paladin, which isn't that big of a deal -- the project manager part of the IDE is very much a simple build. PalEdit, however, is not. Only now is it possible to build it with Paladin.

The primary reason for the complexity with PalEdit are rez files. For those unfamiliar with it, rez is the name of a resource compiler for Macintosh. Maarten Hekkelman, the programmer behind Sum-It and Pe, wrote a version for BeOS which uses text-based resource files for menus, dialog windows, key bindings, and more. Sum-It and Pe -- and by inheritance, PalEdit -- use these files extensively, so until now, jam has been a requirement to build Paladin's text editor. While this is not a shot at jam, for someone who much prefers an IDE to a text editor and a terminal, this is a pain.

It's not all perfect, though. This is the development branch, after all. There are issues in building Sum-It, but this might be because of the speed with which I put the project for building it together. Then again, putting together a project with Paladin should be quick and relatively painless. Either way, the rez resource compiler isn't all that helpful in handling errors in its files. In the process, though, I patched some more bugs in the stable branch. Progress is good. :)

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