Lesson 22: A First (Bigger) Project

After a long hiatus, here is the next lesson in the series. Lesson 22 begins a project which will delve deeper into what is involved in developing larger projects in Haiku. In this case, we begin working on a text editor, QuickEdit.

Programming with Haiku, Lesson 22
Lesson 22 Source Code

What's in a Name

In case you haven't heard, Mozilla spawned a new project -- a 3d gaming engine for browsers. The name? Gladius. It's part of a general platform called Paladin. Yes, you heard that right. Paladin. I've even contacted the main developer, Alan Kligman. I haven't heard back from him about the name conflict, but I'm less than pleased. Especially in light of this thread on their Google Groups list. Gee, thanks, guys. I *really* don't want to have to rename my 3-year-old IDE because some people over at Mozilla chose the same name. Stay tuned.

Hot & Cold... Meh

Yeesh. A month since my last post here. It would seem that sometimes I run hot and cold in my Haiku hacking efforts and right now I seem to have hit a cold spell. I'm just having a hard time conjuring up the motivation to write code, lessons, or much of anything else at the moment. I've started up my own PC repair business on the side from school, so some of my "free" time is being spent working on it. I'm not going anywhere, but apparently I need a little time off. I'm not going anywhere, but things might be quiet for a little while. You know where to find me in the mean time. Have a great one everyone. :-)

Time Flies...

Even when you're not having fun, it seems. I haven't been doing anything out of the ordinary and, lo and behold, it's the first day of school for me. Time seems to have gotten away from me on this one -- I haven't been able to get done anything I planned to a couple of weeks ago. It'll probably take a little time to recover from the madness that is the schedule during the first couple of weeks of school, but I haven't given up. I've got a lesson that is almost complete and ready to publish and another started. Paladin is making good headway but I apparently won't get a release out before summer's end. Ah well. C'est la vie. Until next time, everyone.

News Stew

From the looks of this blog the last few weeks, you'd think that I'd dropped off the face of the earth, but you'd be wrong. I've just been too busy to post. I took a week off for vacation, but I've also been coding quite a bit. I planned on doing a lot more while on vacation -- coding is fun for me -- but I ran into some problems which shot most of the time I could've spent writing code. Anyway, I'm in the process of retooling the code responsible for using project templates in order to make them more flexible. I've also been working on a couple of lessons. One finishes out the Translation Kit, but it's taking a *lot* longer than most lessons would because I'm in the process of learning the basics of writing a Translator and a support framework for writing them. Writing a Translator isn't hard, but it is unfamiliar for me.

Paladin's next release is now on the horizon. The new work on the template section will make more complicated possible, including one which is *this* *close* to being usable: a Tracker Addon template which should make writing them dramatically easier. There are some new command-line utilities which I've written that should come in handy. luare (lu-AR-ay), does regular expression search-and-replace without the mess that is sed. luagrep searches for text in a file, but only one file -- it's mostly meant to be used in combination with find. A text-based build system, pbuild, should make into the release. I've wanted to use a text-based build system for Paladin development, but I wasn't satisfied by any of them out there: make is weird and aggravating, scons is slow, jam has zero documentation, and many are just overkill. pbuild leverages full-blown Lua in a way that you don't have to write much to do basic tasks, but more complicated stuff is possible.

New to Paladin is a Find command which searches all project files and it works quite nicely. It'll be possible to search using regular expressions, but it will be using Lua's regular expressions. Lua doesn't do regular expressions quite the same as Perl or *NIX, but it's pretty close -- most of the differences are just few obscure uses. The boost in speed and simplicity are worth the change.

I haven't stopped writing, just slowed down because the work isn't as easy or fast as I'd like and I'm also trying to get most of the Paladin work for the release done before I have to go back to school. Have a great one, everybody!