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Quanta compiles against KDevelop master again! (November 21, 2010)

Hey all,

another blog post today, I’m on fire :) This one is shorter though: I want to notify you all that Quanta compiles against KDevelop master again (i.e. what will become 4.2 and uses the MovingInterface from Kate).

If you are using KDevelop 4.1 and want to use one of the Quanta plugins, like XML or CSS language support or XDebug or Crossfire integration, checkout the 4.1 branch.

I hope to work more on Quanta again over the next days, hope I can finally get it into a usable state…

Bye!

Short GSOC 2010 Note (August 22, 2010)

Hey all,

before I go on a short one-week vacation, I wanted to leave you a short note about the outcome of my GSOC, where I tried to revive the Quanta+ brand.

First up, I passed, many thanks to my mentor Andras Mantia. But well, it’s not like I got that for free. In a first estimation I did about 500 commits to Quanta, PHP and KDevplatform in the last three months. So I hope you all agree that I deserve the Google money :)

But lets talk about what I planned to achieve and what I actually achieved:

the XML/HTML plugin is working quite well but is still requiring lots of polishing
the browser preview plugin is supposedly being worked on by another studen in Brazil, I’m awaiting her first results and will polish it together with her.
you still cannot rename tags and automatically rename the close tag as well or similar
the multilang branches have imo nice API additions and seem to work reasonably well. At least my test cases of CSS inside HTML worked fine for me

Anyhow, on one hand I’m personally satisfied with what I achieved code wise, esp. looking at the diffs and knowing how many iterations some of the multilang structures required. On the other hand I had hoped to achieve much more. A first alpha release of Quanta is really not visible to me in the near future.

Final days of Quanta GSOC 2010 (August 04, 2010)

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.

Quanta GSOC midterm evaluation (July 08, 2010)

Hey there!

Midterm evaluations for GSOC are coming up and Andris Mantia, my mentor I finally met at Akademy, asked be to blog about what we already have in Quanta. Because there is a lot and most of you are not aware of that. And to be honest it’s actually too much to put into a single blog post, so I hope to do more of a series of blog posts showing off some features.

Quanta 4 is not Quanta 3

Anyhow, I fear that a disclaimer is in place, for all of you who are desperately looking forward a KDE4 version of Quanta. The thing is, I cannot, nor do I want to, port Quanta from KDE3 times as-is to KDE4. Instead I build on top of the KDevplatform that is also used for KDevelop and KTechlab. By sharing the basic code it gets much easier to maintain Quanta in the future. This decision brings two things with it:

We get an awesome library to built new stuff on top, making things like the new PHP which is already much more advanced than anything from KDE3, actually plugin possible.
We don’t have all features from Quanta 3 or if we have, they might look and work differently. This also means that you won’t be able to take your Quanta 3 workflow without changes over to Quanta 4.

KDevelop PHP Advancements: Namespaces and Error Recovery (June 24, 2010)

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.

KDevelop - ExternalScript plugin (June 16, 2010)

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).

KDevelop Webdev plugins merged into Quanta GIT (June 14, 2010)

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

First Days of Quanta+ GSOC 2010 (June 05, 2010)

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?

GSOC: Revive Quanta+ Brand for KDE 4 (April 28, 2010)

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)

PHP support for KDevelop 4 (and eventually Quanta+) (March 03, 2009)

Hello Planet KDE!

I want to give you a little insight on the current state of PHP support in KDevelop4:

Me and Nikolaus Sams (nsams) are working diligently on a plugin for PHP support in playground. It’s somewhat stable, i.e. we fix any crashes we stumble upon, but I would call it Alpha state at most. It may eat your babies so to speak. Yet I’m happy to say that at least one user is already using it for production (hi leinir ;-) ).

implemented PHP support

Well, here’s a (not complete) list of features that are already working. Though I have to warn you: no screenshots included ;-) It’s actually all very similar to the C++ screenies you can see on the web.

sematic highlighting

Let’s start with a feature that only very recently was added for PHP - semantic highlighting. Niko moved some language independent parts of the C++ plugin from KDevelop to KDevplatform and now PHP has the same code highlighting features as C++.