Milian Wolff

Hey everyone,

as the pencils down for this years GSOC is approaching I thought it’s time to write another blog entry to notify the world about my current status.

These past weeks (boy, the time flies…) I’ve mostly spent on hardcore KDevplatform internals. Especially getting multiple languages in a single document working was not easy. I knew it would be the most time consuming and most demanding aspect during these three months, but also by far the most important. I’m confident to say now: I’m nearly there. All projects we put into the KDevelop repository have now a multilang branch in their team clones. And if you look at e.g. the KDevplatform multilang branch or the Quanta multilang branch you hopefully agree that I didn’t slack off too much. I just wasted some time to find the right approach, often by implementing one just to find out it was not practicable.

Thanks (once again) to the help of David Nolden I’m now on the right track. Finally :)

When you use the multilang branches (note: you’ll have to use them everywhere as they contain binary incompatible changes to the master branches), you should already get proper DUChain integration for CSS inside HTMLs <style> tags, which is what I used for testing purposes. I’ve just pushed the required changes to get code completion work properly as well.

This is all still in a quite rough stage and needs lots more work but it proves that I’m getting there. Once this is done I can continue to polish the CSS and XML language plugins, as well as finally writing a “preview HTML” plugin, as this was probably the most requested plugin from back then.

Looking at my tentative timeline for GSOC, I’m afraid to say that I didn’t get to do all of it. But I’m quite proud of what I achieved and hope you all agree that my time was well spent on Quanta. I won’t stop working on it probably after GSOC, quite the contrary. I still hope to release at least some alphas this fall and maybe get it into beta state in winter. What about a Quanta 4.0 release in spring 2011? Who knows :)

Bye

Good news everyone!

I’m happy to announce the availability of our first patch level release for KDevelop 4. You can get it and the related packages from:

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/kdevelop/4.0.1/src/

This is a bugfix only release and everyone is urged to upgrade as soon as possible. Below you find a list of changes that went into this release.

Users should wait for their distributions to provide packages for them.

Thanks to the KDevelop contributors for making this possible and to the users for giving us valuable feedback.

PS: I hope to release a second patch level release in a month, assuming we find more to fix.

Bye

KDevplatform 1.0.1 Changelog

* Milian Wolff: don't emit documentJumpPerformed when nothing changed
* Milian Wolff: prevent infinite loop when url gets saved and triggers loading of new language plugin
* Milian Wolff: fix ${selection} in snippets
* Milian Wolff: properly handle manual document switches in context browser toolbar
* Milian Wolff: fix: make it possible to activate repository in singleclick mode
* Andras Mantia: Really load (and use as a replace source) the global ui.rc file, not the local one.
* Milian Wolff: properly add codecompletion to existing documents
* Mantia Andras: Enable select all/copy in the frame widget.
* Mantia Andras: Propagate shortcuts setting to all the opened editor views.
* Andreas Pakulat: Fix accessing of temp-files for windows.
* Milian Wolff: properly handle unterminated strings in comments, fixes code completion after those
* Milian Wolff: properly remove watcher to prevent crashes in smartrange dtor
* Andreas Pakulat: Also set CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH
* Andreas Pakulat: Make sure kdevplatform is properly linked
* Milian Wolff: put snippets completion items at end of list
* Milian Wolff: fix clearComments for unterminated comments
* Nicolás Alvarez: Create Class: Refresh move button state when a list item is removed too.
* Nicolás Alvarez: When moving items in Create Class inheritance list, update selection.
* Nicolás Alvarez: Update move up/down buttons when selection changes in inheritance list.
* Milian Wolff: prevent endless recursion
* Nicolás Alvarez: Change "Stop Jobs" icon from dialog-close to process-stop.
* Andreas Pakulat: Fix documentation for the .desktop files
* Milian Wolff: don't go into edit-item mode on doubleclick or single click
* Niko Sams: Fix crash when closing kdevelop with running debug session
* Niko Sams: Fix crash that can happen during shutdown with an active debug session
* Andras Mantia: Avoid calling emitResult() in failed case. internalJobDone() is called anyway, and that calls emitResult(). The problem is: when the error message is shown, the eventLoop is reentered, the job is deleted. The emitResult() call after tries to use the deleted job -> crash. This might be only a workaround, but fixes bug 229557 (and its duplicates), bug 227823, bug 232444, 227584.
* Milian Wolff: properly escape dot before git folder
* Andreas Pakulat: End the namespace before the macros.
* Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé: Fixed syntax-errors in ibrowsableversioncontrol.
* Milian Wolff: add a \c where appropriate, add missing dot
* Andreas Pakulat: Add some api dox how to get at plugins and load them properly.
* Andreas Pakulat: Use the complete url of the active document.
* Milian Wolff: make snippet invalid when name contains spaces
* Milian Wolff: allow anything non-space in snippet's code completion model
* Eike Hein: Meet HIG rules about alignment in forms.
* Milian Wolff: make QuickOpen look like a proper menu/dropdown
* Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Fixed setting of maximum height for button and stack so that expander arrow pixmap is not trunkated when small font is used.
* Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Removed unnecessary calls to "setAutoFillBackground(true)". this allows main window background gradient (if any) to be painted right. (like in e.g. oxygen, bespin). Does not affect other styles.
* Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Keep vertical size policy unchanged when embedding KLineEdit inside toolbar.
* Hugo Pereira Da Costa: Rotate back icon so that it is still painted horizontally even for vertical buttons Use option->iconSize to decide which pixmap must be rotated.
* Hugo Pereira Da Costa: This patch modifies the painting of sidebar vertical toolbuttons so that - the button frame is painted "non-rotated" - only the text is painted rotated. This fixes how buttons shadows are rendered. Screenshot at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo-oxygen-icons-org/4584572966/sizes/o/
* Andreas Pakulat: Increase minor version.
* Andreas Pakulat: Remove kross from subdirs list
* Bertjan Broeksema: Port away from deprecated KLibLoader::self to KPluing loader.
* Bertjan Broeksema: Initialize members in the right order.
* Bertjan Broeksema: Clean up
* Bertjan Broeksema: Fix warning and clean up.
* Bertjan Broeksema: Fix a compile warning related to deprecated hash_map.
* Bertjan Broeksema: Fix a bunch of trivial compile time warnings.
* Milian Wolff: fix LGPL file as proposed by TZander
* Milian Wolff: fix compile when ifDebug is enabled
* Niko Sams: Debugger: Only switch back to code area if there is an active MainWindow.
* Volker Krause: build with -pedantic
* Andreas Pakulat: Don't crash if dynamic_cast fails.
* Thomas McGuire: Fix progress popups being transparent.

KDevelop 4.0.1 Changelog

* Milian Wolff: fix overflow in CMakeFunctionArgument::unescapeValue
* Andras Mantia: Remove some conflicting shortcuts from the katepart.
* Milian Wolff: fix: allow incr as identifier, it's not the ++ token after all
* Milian Wolff: don't crash on nullptr type in getPointerTarget
* Milian Wolff: fix shouldStartCompletion when writing a path in a #include, inserted is not only a single char
* Milian Wolff: don't crash when getContainerType does not find a declaration for the identified type in the given topcontext
* Andreas Pakulat: Fix opening files with relative path.
* Andreas Pakulat: Set CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH to lib-installdir
* Andreas Pakulat: Make sure kdevplatform is properly linked
* Milian Wolff: use canonicalFilePath as absoluteFilePath might lead to problems when resolving relative includes in symlinked directories
* Nicolás Alvarez: Fix another possible leak
* Nicolás Alvarez: Fix memory leak in CMakeListsParser::readCMakeFile.
* Milian Wolff: don't advance over EOF, might lead to invalid tokens and crashes
* Aleix Pol: Prevent calling a null pointer.
* Aleix Pol: Add proper support for the Break command.
* Andreas Pakulat: Don't try to open a non-existing file.
* Milian Wolff: make __volatile__ a synonym for volatile
* Milian Wolff: don't recurse into the same class in typeutils::getMemberFunctions
* Esben Mose Hansen: Find build directory even in root CMakeLists.txt
* Milian Wolff: fix uses in argument lists of pure virtuals
* Esben Mose Hansen: Use config mode as fallback if no module is found, and set package_DIR in all cases where a module was not found
* David nolden: Turn an assertion into a warning BUG: 236411
* Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear/sdk.
* Kovarththanan Rajaratnam: Remove FindCppUnit.cmake now that the CppUnit plugin no longer exists
* Kovarththanan Rajaratnam: Remove FindCheck.cmake now that the Check plugin no longer exists
* Andreas Pakulat: Increase version number
* Niko Sams: Quote variable expressions correctly.
* Milian Wolff: set invalid range on final location of problem when include path resolver found more paths than the build manager
* Andreas Pakulat: Fix kdevelop app icon for windows.
* David nolden: Use a mutex to prevent setupStandardMacros() and setupStandardIncludePaths() from being called multiple times at the same time, preventing a crash.     BUG: 236434
* Bertjan Broeksema: Fix compile warnings related to deprecated hash_map
* Andreas Pakulat: Also search for qmake-qt4

KDevelop-PHP 1.0.1 Changelog

* Milian Wolff: fix compile
* Milian Wolff: remove includebuilder
* Milian Wolff: support $a->{$...}
* Milian Wolff: dont fail parsing on $c::func(); or $c::const; BUG: 244076
* Milian Wolff: fix use builder in static member arrays
* Milian Wolff: remove obsolete cmake file that never got run in the first place
* Milian Wolff: fix build of stable, we don't depend on kdevelop-pg-qt there
* Milian Wolff: fix logic to find already up-to-date files in the parsejob
* Milian Wolff: don't start include parsejob when there is already a background parsejob for that file, should prevent deadlock
* Milian Wolff: invalidate declaration done in method body when it got added to class body
* Milian Wolff: don't search in parent contexts for variables
* Niko Sams: Improve implementation helper: don't add return statement for void functions
* Niko Sams: Fix implementation helper for static methods
* Niko Sams: increase version number
* Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear sdk.

KDevelop-PHP-Docs 1.0.1 Changelog

* Milian Wolff: remove cmake_minimum_required, obsolete (due to KDE requirement) and breaks build when po files are included
* Niko Sams: Remove support for building the whole extragear sdk.

Hey everyone!

Apparently “Application Integration from KDE Finance Group” is not taking place, instead Aleix and me will fill the gap and talk about KDevelop 4. We haven’t got any slides and only prepared roughly yesterday, but we decided just to show KDevelop 4 in action. Lets hope that there will be something in there for any interested KDE developer.

I’ll definitely show some assistants again, since apparently many people still ignore them even though they are imo one of the best features we have.

So come to room I at 12:15 :)

PS: Short note regarding KDevelop at Akademy: I’m pleasantly surprised again to see so many KDevelop users around. You all rock!

Hi there,

just a quicky before I head off to bed and go on a short vacation the next few days:

PHP support in KDevelop now has support for the first PHP 5.3 feature, namely namespaces. I’m still convinced that the syntax sucks pretty bad in PHP’s implementation of namespaces but well, my hands are tight and I had to support it. Anyhow, with PHP master you shouldn’t get syntax errors anymore when using namespaces, but instead proper code completion, syntax highlighting and context information… Well, full blown DUChain integration :)

Furthermore I just introduced the first few error recoveries in PHP that should make the situation a bit better when you work on a broken file. Up until now any parse error resulted in a file with no advanced PHP features at all until you fixed that parse error. Now it should at least skip parse errors in code segments between braces (classes, functions, conditionals, namespaces, …). It can be much improved of course, and I’ll do just that next week.

Bye!

Heyho, me again :)

Seems like I have quite the urge to write blog posts recently… Anyhow:

The last two days I reimplemented / ported two features from Quanta 3 times to KDevelop (if you still didn’t get it: everything is a plugin, hece it will be reused in Quanta 4). What I’m talking about is most importantly the revival of a “execute external script” plugin. It’s currently still in a feature branch, but will hopefully be merged into master soon. But what can you do with it? Well, think about the following usecases and see how they can be solved with this plugin:

I want to compile and run a simple helloworld.cpp-like file without setting up a build environment nor do I want to setup a project for it.

Use an external script: quick compile. It just runs this command: g++ -o %b %f && ./%f
In this code %f gets replaced with the path to the currently active file and%b is it’s basename (i.e. without extension).

I want to sort / uniq / … the selection in the current document.

Here you can either use Kate Scripts, which gives you the same features. But to show you the capabilities of the external script plugin, this is a good example:
Setup an external script, that gets the current selection (or the whole file if nothing is selected) piped into it’s STDIN and let the selection (or, again, the whole file if nothing was selected) in the active document get replaced by the STDOUT of the external script. I’ve added an example doing just that.

I want to google for the selection in the active document.

I got this example from the External Tools plugin for Kate, and made it possible to do that with the new plugin in KDevelop. Simply use the following script: xdg-open "http://google.com/search?q=%s"
Note: %s gets replaced by the shell-escaped version of the selected text in the document.

I want to run an external syntax checker on my file / folder / …

Simply use an external script for it :) With the various %... placeholders it should be easy enough to do.

Here are a few screenshots showing the tool in action:

Second feature that I pushed in, which you can also see in action for the external scripts, is the possibility to assign shortcuts to snippets and external scripts. Eventually I’ll also try to bring back the “user toolbars” from Quanta 3 times, but I hope to do that properly inside KDELibs for reuse by other applications.

Another thing: In Quanta 3 times it was easier to create external scripts that showed some UI and asked for more user input. This is not possible since Kommander (which was used back then) is not available nowadays. If someone polishes the afaik halfway working port, I’m willing to implement it again. Anyhow I think nowadays one should use Qt Designer and Ruby or Python bindings to create UIs. Sure, a bit harder but much more powerful.

But well, now it’s your turn to write cool external scripts :) And to give me feedback: What kind of scripts would you write? What %... placeholders do you need?

PS: Even though I booked flights and accommodation ages ago, I haven’t yet announced it in proper KDE-style yet:

Quick note:

I’ve just merged all webdevelopment related plugins except PHP & PHP-Docs into Quanta git. You can get them all in one place now by cloning Quanta: http://gitorious.org/kdevelop/quanta

Since I also moved all halfworking plugins to UNPORTED (they don’t get installed), you should be fine by just installing all of Quanta to get the plugins. If you only want one of them, going into it’s subfolder and building it standalone should hopefully still work though.

In other notes: Thanks to Ruan Styrdom for starting work on a PHP formatter plugin for KDevelop. It uses phpStylist and it’s already somewhat working. Awesome :)

/me is off to more GSOC hacking, bye

Hello everyone,

I have the urge to write a quick wrap up over the just finished LinuxTag 2010: All in all, I had a good time. Really, imo it was better than last time (granted though, last LinuxTag sucked pretty badly).

Anyhow, this time was my first shot at being a speaker. Boy was I nervous… I trembled quite badly at the beginning but got confident after a few minutes. Too many “ähm“‘s and “äh“‘s though ;-) Anyhow, I apparently did my job well enough: My talk was about KDevelop 4 - Faster C++ Programming. But yeah, I did it in German (it was my first talk on such a convention, and I was already nervous enough :P), but still - since I did a live presentation I was apparently able to impress even non-German speaking attendees by the sheer amount of visual coolness I could present :)

Really, the C++ features in KDevelop I showed are so nuts and awesome, I have to thank David and friends for implementing them in KDevelop. Great job everyone! It made my life as a speaker quite easy :)

If anyone is interested in the German talk (audio is good, visuals not really…), you can download a 23min part of the talk on rapidshare: http://rapidshare.com/files/397758262/Milian-LT2010.M4V.html (Thanks to Adrian for recording and uploading it!)

What this talk showed me in retrospect, esp. combined with the feedback I got afterwards and the recurring nags in #kdevelop on freenode, is that we are in dire need of writing documentation for KDevelop. Since we devels don’t have much time for that (and it’s boring…) I think/hope to write at least a short blog series about “hidden” features, i.e. the stuff I showed in my talk. Starting with that, I hope that one of you, dear readers, steps up and creates a proper Docbook documentation out of that :)

Oh and yeah, I had quite a few chats with the friends from QtCreator developers over at the Qt/Nokia booth. They do a quite good job at catching up with us apparently :P Well, that’s what they have their payed developers for after all ;-) One real “advantage” KDevelop has though, is that it’s inherently language agnostic. The Qt guys have of course no intention to support e.g. PHP. We otoh want that - and already do so. I had a few chats with (sometimes future) users of our PHP plugin and got quite good feedback, which I want to implement eventually. Even so, I actually started implementing the first features for PHP 5.3 support: Namespaces. If someone wants a good laugh, look at how that is designed for PHP 5.3, it must have been a drunken Windows guy that never used Namespaces in any other language before… sigh.

Anyways, back to LinuxTag in general: It was of course nice again to see so many fellow KDE developers and supporters. Also seeing the good old Ubuntu Berlin and LinuxTag crowd I “know” now after four years here, was a good thing. What I have to say is that attending a conference and actually taking the time to visit a few talks is much nicer than staying at the booth all time. Yes, sorry Eckhart for even doing some hacking on the booth, but we should all take that time for ourselves. We’ve been a large crowd at the booth nevertheless, esp. since we had the combined manpower (and women!) of Amarok, Kubuntu and KDE! And attending conferences and having some quiet time makes booth-work much more bearable. It’s not like I didn’t talk to people though, quite the contrary. But as always (esp. at events like LinuxTag), you get to talk to at least one insane person every day ;-) And after the second you kind of start to loose your faith in humanity… :P

Nice as always were the social events surrounding the fair-hours, most notably of course the “friends of Qt/Nokia” dinner that served us awesome food once again. The social event of the LinuxTag at Thursday was much better than last year (even though / because?) it was sponsored by Microsoft this year. Good job that we == KDE rocked the dance floor of course ;-) Tonight we wrapped it up with the usual Ubuntu BBQ at cbase, a nice end to an imo good event. If they can improve it some more next year by pushing the community aspect more once again, I’m confident that LinuxTag in Berlin could become as good as it was a few years ago!

Anyhow, now I really have to do some more catch-up for Quanta GSOC ;-) Good night!

Ok, finally I take the time to blog again.

The last two weeks have been a busy time for me and I couldn’t find as much time for GSOC as I would have wanted. I had to finish up some things at KDAB where I spent the last three months doing an internship (maybe I should write another blog about that eventually…). Afterwards I took five days of vacation, visiting a friend in Lisboa, Portugal - a very good decision to clear my head :) Esp. considering that I directly dropped back into my old job at the IT administration here at my university, where I had to quickly finish another project that I delayed until the last days possible ;-)

But… Even before GSOC officially started I already committed a few small things. But yesterday and today I finally started for good. Thanks to the discussion with Andris (my mentor) I actually think to know what I have to do ;-) Porting Quanta+ is not an easy task, even though there is already a Quanta binary that links against KDE4 and “works”. There are tons of files and hundres of lines of code commented out that are left to be ported. And I have to wager: What can I port in the few weeks left for GSOC and what should I drop for now? What is superseded, or should be eventually superseded, by a proper KDevplatform integrated plugin?

But well, I think I know what to do for the next few days:

• make Quanta specific code specific to Quanta (yeah, cool eh :P)
  currently QuantaCore is a plugin and hence also shows up in KDevelop showing Quanta specific stuff there, not nice
• spruce up Ruan Strydom’s XML plugin for KDevplatform and purge the DTEP stuff in Quanta while merging as much as possible
• make the ‘insert tag’ etc. pp. related actions, toolbars from Quanta3 work again
• polish Niko Sams upload, css, xdebug, execute script, execute browser plugins

If I manage most of these, I’m confident to say that I reached an important step towards a once again useful Quanta. Lets see how it works out.

Hey everyone,

I spent some time today browsing teh interwebz to look at the responses our first KDevelop 4.0 release triggered so far. Quite fun I have to admit, given this is the first release of something I actively helped to develop that actually gets a response on the net ;-) What I noticed among the ‘I use VS’, ‘I use vi’, ‘I use ed’ comments (besides ‘I use emacs’):

• sadly we didn’t update the screenshots everywhere yet, making some people believe we actually look like kdev 3 still ;-) this is not true, take a look here: http://apaku.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/kdevelop-4-0-screenshots/
• yes we have support for PHP and everyone knows PHP sucks but still everyone uses it ;-) But few seem to notice that C++ is actually “just another plugin”. And we already have support for Ruby, Java and Css somewhat working in the pipelines. And very experimental stuff for C#, python and XML is also there. Imo what we said in the release announcement is true: KDev 4 is much more open for new languages than anything before. It does take some effort, true, but the result is much more pleasing.
• we’d really welcome new blood in our dev team, esp. for new language support plugins or things like automake, qmake and qt-designer support. there are outdated plugins available, someone just has to polish them…

But all in all I’m amazed by the trolling/feedback ratio. It’s a really good feeling to see so many positive comments on various websites and $random-stranger defending KDevelop against the forces of the trolls :)

I’ll definitely continue working on KDevelop and make sure we’ll continue to improve over the time. This is just the beginning evil laughter :)

Btw. funniest comment on heise.de (German): KDevelop 4.0.0 is a released intended for developers. Of course, it’s an IDE, duh :P

Yay I got a GSOC slot :)

So I hope I don’t have to introduce myself anymore to you guys. Instead I’ll show you what I’ve planned to do over the summer:

Motivation for Proposal / Goal:

Back in KDE 3 times, Quanta+ was one of the reasons for me to use KDE. In my eyes it was the IDE for web development out there, and I loved to use it. Sadly it’s bitrotting nowadays without a finished KDE 4 port. That, combined with the fact that more and more distributions drop all KDE 3 packages, makes the need for a port more urgent than ever.

Implementation Details:

Thankfully, KDevelop 4 is nearing it’s first release and the KDevplatform is mature enough nowadays. This means that during summer I shall finish the port of Quanta+ to KDevplatform and supply it with all the plugins required for a proper webdevelopment IDE. My goal is it to provide a proper IDE for PHP webdevelopment. In more detail:

• make Quanta+ 4 compile
• remove obsolete plugins or code parts in Quanta+
• port required plugins to KDevplatform structure
• polish PHP plugin, including XDebug support
• polish Script Execute plugin
• polish CSS plugin
• get a first working version of a XHTML/XML plugin, if time allows even with HTML (SGML) support
  • support autocompletion
  • support inline validation
  • support documents that use multiple languages (XML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript) at the same time
• polish the UI/Workflow for Webdevelopment
  • hide KDevelop/C++ specific actions
  • add templates for common PHP frameworks
• if time allows, get a rough support for JavaScript (at least Outline for functions)

Put these all together with the existing features in KDevplatform we can reuse, we’ll end up with a hopefully useable IDE for webdevelopment. Hence my final goal is it to release a first Beta version of Quanta+ for KDE4.

Tentative Timeline:

1. getting rough first shell of Quanta+ 4 up and running, removing old cruft, cleaning up old code and porting required things
   ~ 3 weeks
2. polish existing plugins (PHP, XDebug, Execute Script, CSS, Upload)
   ~ 2 weeks
3. create XHTML/XML plugin
   ~ 3 weeks
4. polish UI/workflow
   ~ 2 weeks
5. bug hunting etc., ending in a first beta release of Quanta+ for KDE 4:
   ~ 2 weeks

Lets see whether it works out as planned. But I think this commit shows you that I’m on the right track:

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/sdk/quanta/data/pics/quanta-splash…