While writing our applications we do care about how we accomplish our programming tasks. We want to efficiently write code, easily debug, sync with the repository, etc. But does it really matter what kind of representation on disk our projects have? Let's just imagine a tool that allows you to write code, has code refactoring and completion, builds your projects and api documentation easily, whatever else you could imagine. And if we had this tool, would it be important that the tool stores its data on disk to files? I don't think it would be important. At least I wouldn't care.
The problem is only that we don't have such tool. Editors let you do all that stuff by hand. IDEs try to do that but usualy suck in several cases. And they don't suck because of plain file representation of the code. IDEs usually have several representations of code and project in memory in format that you mentioned (yep, smth like semantic networks, trees, whatever) and they can (and do) store that into disk in binary formats. So the problem is not having the representation but implementing things you're asking about. It just takes enormous amount of time and believe me, implementing source parsers is not the only task that takes that time.
20 August 2005
17 August 2005
KDE-Eclipse
Today I finally got back home. This time I was able to commit all my stuff to the SVN and prepare a little website for those who are curious about what is KDE-Eclipse. Visit http://kde-eclipse.pwsp.net and enjoy!
16 August 2005
Eclipse hacking experience
I've been working on my Google SOC KDE-Eclipse project for several weeks now and what I can tell you is that hacking on Eclipse is a cool experience :) I like that and I don't think I'll drop KDE-Eclipse after 1st of September.
Before I started I knew Eclipse is huge. In reality this doesn't hurt you IMHO just because it has good architecture and it is written in good language (yes, java is ok for me;)). The documentation doesn't help you much though. First, it is not sufficient and second (and importrant) you do not learn much from the documentation.
Thankfully, you have the source code and I really appreciate the source code of Eclipse is open. That's because only from source you can learn as much as necessary. And this fact leads me to think more and more that open source is not about "reusing software" (commercial companies do that as well) but about "reusing experience" which is hidden inside the source.
I have the strong belief that people who write the software are more important than the software itself and by looking to the source code you can gain at least part of experience of people who wrote it. That's the power of open source, that's "reusing experience" concept at work!
Speaking back about Eclipse, I noticed that it's not uncommon when you spend several hours digging into source and docs trying to figure out how things work, how things you have in mind should work and then you spend 15-30 minutes coding your stuff ;) In that respect KDevelop is much easier to hack on. Basically, if you have an idea how usual KDE comonent application works, you can hack on lot of things in KDevelop.
PS: in several days I will commit the stuff I wrote last week so everybody could at last try it in use (yes, it's usable enough now ;)).
Before I started I knew Eclipse is huge. In reality this doesn't hurt you IMHO just because it has good architecture and it is written in good language (yes, java is ok for me;)). The documentation doesn't help you much though. First, it is not sufficient and second (and importrant) you do not learn much from the documentation.
Thankfully, you have the source code and I really appreciate the source code of Eclipse is open. That's because only from source you can learn as much as necessary. And this fact leads me to think more and more that open source is not about "reusing software" (commercial companies do that as well) but about "reusing experience" which is hidden inside the source.
I have the strong belief that people who write the software are more important than the software itself and by looking to the source code you can gain at least part of experience of people who wrote it. That's the power of open source, that's "reusing experience" concept at work!
Speaking back about Eclipse, I noticed that it's not uncommon when you spend several hours digging into source and docs trying to figure out how things work, how things you have in mind should work and then you spend 15-30 minutes coding your stuff ;) In that respect KDevelop is much easier to hack on. Basically, if you have an idea how usual KDE comonent application works, you can hack on lot of things in KDevelop.
PS: in several days I will commit the stuff I wrote last week so everybody could at last try it in use (yes, it's usable enough now ;)).
aKademy
Finally it looks like I'm good to go to aKademy. After 3 visits to Spanish embassy (which is 600 km away from my home), 4 days of making phone calls to the embassy trying just to arrange an interview and 2 days of calling to know the result, I was told that I have my visa. Whew :) Now I just need to go to the embassy and take my documents back.
Also thanks to Trolltech (thank you Harald! :)) and KDE-eV (thanks Mirko and other guys :)) my travel expenses will be reimbursed.
That's going to be cool :) I will be able to spend 5 days (till 1st September) hacking on KDE-Eclipse (I'm starting to like that job;) but that's another blog) and other 4 days hacking on KDevelop4.
Also thanks to Trolltech (thank you Harald! :)) and KDE-eV (thanks Mirko and other guys :)) my travel expenses will be reimbursed.
That's going to be cool :) I will be able to spend 5 days (till 1st September) hacking on KDE-Eclipse (I'm starting to like that job;) but that's another blog) and other 4 days hacking on KDevelop4.
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