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!

Programming with Haiku, Lesson 21: Replicants

Here is a topic that for the longest time as a BeOS/Haiku developer, I had no idea how to do and didn't really feel enthused on the concept of learning. Of course, now all the major platforms have desktop gadgets. Ironically, writing a replicant is really easy if you already know how to write basic Haiku GUI applications already. Find out how in this lesson.

Programming with Haiku, Lesson 21

COOOder Craziness in Ubuntu

Here's a quick tip for all of you who use the package openoffice.org-coooder in Ubuntu: don't install from Synaptic. It won't work unless you know some advanced dpkg kung-fu that I don't. Instead, go to your friendly neighborhood Ubuntu mirror and download the .deb manually. Double-click on it to install it and everything will work just fine. Here's a download link for your convenience: COOOder at the US Ubuntu mirror. Have a great day everyone!

Haiku, Meet Lua. Lua, Haiku

I've been pretty quiet since I got out of school last week. It's not because I've been too busy to do anything. Quite the contrary. I've had my head down in the trenches, hacking away. About six months ago, I posted a screenshot of CHaikuRun, a test application which interacted with the Haiku API from the C language. I have a new one:

On the outside, not all that different from the other one. Under the hood, though, the two test apps are worlds apart. Here is the source code:


function LuaAppSetupFunction()
    local win = MakeObject("PWindow");
    win.SetProperty("Frame", PRect(100,100,500,400))
    win.SetProperty("Flags", BQuitOnWindowClose)
    win.SetProperty("Title", "LuaGUI")

    local view = MakeObject("PView")
    view.SetProperty("Frame", PRect(0,0,400,300))
    view.SetProperty("BackColor", PColor(224,224,224));
    win.RunMethod("AddChild", {view.id})
   
    local label = MakeObject("PLabel");
    label.SetProperty("Frame", PRect(10, 10, 350, 60))
    label.SetProperty("Text", "Haiku, meet Lua!");
    view.RunMethod("AddChild", {label.id})
end

RunApp("application/x-vnd.dw-LuaGUI", "LuaAppSetupFunction");


That's pretty darn short, if you ask me. A graphical HelloWorld app can be written in 6 lines of code:

function LuaAppSetupFunction()
    local win = MakeObject("PWindow");
    win.SetProperty("Flags", BQuitOnWindowClose)
    win.SetProperty("Title", "Hello Haiku!")
end

RunApp("application/x-vnd.dw-LuaGUI", "LuaAppSetupFunction");


And I thought writing in C++ was easy. Yeesh. That beats everything I've seen under Haiku/BeOS except yab and quite competitive to something like wxPython. Then again, I could argue that this is a lot clearer than yab, but I digress.

The code snippets I've posted above are why I manually wrote Lua bindings instead of using SWIG. I'm not sure that I could have gotten SWIG to generate them in a way which has at least the same ease-of-use as the C++ API. I've still got a *lot* more testing to do and some more objects to implement before I can do a release, but this is definitely some progress and some good news, too. It's officially a good day now. :)

Libcharlemagne and Paladin

Just a quick post before I head off to bed. :) While school has been as busy as typical this year, last week and this week (mostly this) have been spent with many moments coding. The results? Project-wide find and replace -- a long-needed feature -- and major progress on libcharlemagne. Most of this library work has actually been spent on writing Lua bindings for libcharlemagne. It's not there yet, but it's getting there.

Originally I was going to use SWIG to do it, but it's hard to have a nice API in a language using a generic wrapper. Some language features just don't wrap very well. On the up side, I found out just how flat-out easy it is to call C from Lua. It's almost scary how easy it is. Current code in writing is to turn tables into libcharlemagne's generic data container and vice versa. Hopefully it won't be *too* long before I can post the source for a Lua script that uses the GUI and make a testing release. TTFN