What I Did With My Winter Holidays, Part 6
Another quick Summer Winter of Code update, since I have to be up again in about six hours to go to my feature film scriptwriting class. While there’s not much visible progress to report, some behind the scenes work has taken place — some of it feature and stabilisation work, some of it deciding what’s in and what’s out of the first release. (More on the upcoming 0.1.0 release later.) In bullet form, here’s what little I’ve managed to accomplish since the last update:
Things done since a week and a bit ago
- Added a dialog that pops up with a property is double clicked and shows the value and type of that property, along with its children. The UI for this isn’t all that pretty (if only wxWidgets had a combo tree/grid control…), but it is functional, and the somewhat ugly nature of the dialog is something that can be dealt with after 0.1.0.
- Rejigged the output in the call stack pane to be more useful without requiring either horizontal scrolling or a tooltip implementation that works. Again, this can be polished a bit more after 0.1.0; the important part for now is that it’s functional.
Things I’ve done but which are currently #ifdef’d out:
- Support for saving a default pane layout. I had issues with wxAuiManager::LoadPerspective and wxAuiManager::SavePerspective the only other time I’ve tried to use them, too, so I’ve presumably misunderstood something fundamental about how they work.
- Watchlist support. Actually, this is on a branch, rather than being #ifdef’d, but that’s mostly because it involved a bit of invasive refactoring of the breakpoint pane code to make it more generic. Said refactoring broke something, and I don’t think I’m going to have time to fix it before 0.1.0 — the priority of this went down considerably when I remembered that XDebug doesn’t actually support watch breakpoints anyway at the moment.
Things pushed to after 0.1.0
- Watchlist support, as above.
- Syntax highlighting rules for languages other than PHP.
The rationale for the above items is that 0.1.0 needs to be out shortly; given the ever-increasing workload of uni (including now having an actual final Computer Science project to do — it’s an interesting one, and I’ll doubtless blog about that soon, but it’s also going to chew up that little sliver of remaining spare time I had outside of film-related work), that means next week, regardless of the SWoC deadlines. Therefore I’m going to concentrate on the functionality required for PHP and XDebug right now, and revisit supporting other DBGp implementations after that.
So, what’s left before 0.1.0?
- Finding a better name than wxDBGp and producing some sort of icon.
- Add an options dialog for font and basic network (IDE key and listening port) settings.
- Windows packaging.
- Write some rudimentary documentation.
That’s now a pretty short list, which is obviously good, given the limited amount of time I have available to work on it now. At this stage, I’m going to try to get that done mid-late next week, so hopefully by this time next week, I can pop up a blog post pointing people to a tarball (and, with luck, an MSI, an OSX application bundle…) and simply stress about everything else.
No screenshot this time, but as threatened a couple of updates ago, here’s a scan of my initial UI design document for the main debugger window. Mark Greenaway can take heart in the knowledge that he’s not the only one with bad handwriting.
