Milian Wolff

Hi there again! I’ve been silent again on my blog, but didn’t rest on development. In the one and a half months since the last digest, I started writing a PHP application This finally made me eat my own dog food :). It resulted in lots of polishing and quite a few bug fixes for the PHP plugin in KDevelop. Here’s a list of what I think are the notably changes since the last digest:

(Note: to view screenshots, go to the bottom of this article.)

• refactoring of parts of the Code Completion code, should already result in faster code under certain situations
• properly mark constants as “Kind: Constant” in the declaration tooltips
• offer argument hints for ctors during code completion in class init statements
• greatly improve the generate inline documentation of built-in PHP functions, classes, properties etc. pp.
  • add documentation of public properties
  • support aliased functions (thanks to Victor Grischenko for his patch)
  • show more/all documentation, and not only the first paragraph
  • fix type-lookup
  • don’t get confused when a documentation file documents both, a method and a function (greatly improves e.g. MySQLi documentation)
• don’t offer “jump to declaration” for built-in PHP declarations
• add support for list(...) statement
• cleanup code-completion list, esp. show the return type of functions in the prefix field, and not something a la “function ReturnType ($arg1, $arg2, …)”
• improve the code-completion for include/require statements
• add language constructs to code completion (e.g. class, while, foreach, print, …)
• show declaration tooltip for magic constants, showing their current value
• make functions, methods and classes case-insensitive, just like PHP handles them
• some performance improvements, especially in code completion and parsing of the generated file containing php-internal declarations
• lots of bug fixes, don’t want to iterate them all ;-)

I created a Flickr account and will push screenshots to it for every upcoming digest I do. To see some of the features I talk about above, visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/milianw/sets/72157622375662249/detail/

EDIT: A note to those that want to try this out , but cannot / don’t want to compile it: I heard that there is / will be an AUR package for Arch users available. And I’d really appreciate it if others could create packages for their favorite distribution as well. You’ll need bleeding-edge kdevplatform + kdevelop though!