the written word remains

As Thiago noted, the deadline for Google Summer of Code applications is approaching. And I'd like to note that we have not many applications for KDevelop related projects yet. Last year there were about 7-8 (or more), 3 of which were accepted. This year we have 2 applications filled and 1 pending. What does that mean? This means that you have a chance to get your KDevelop-related project accepted. Go ahead!

IDE's are usually created to make things easier and faster for developers. And most of them achieve this goal to some extent. But there is one group of people that has always suffered from IDE's. Those people are application template developers.

Tons of subtle application template formats were invented to bend to submission those miserable souls who wanted to add their little template!

Anjuta requires you to write a nice xml file with template description including wizard page layout options, list of template files, directories and of rename rules. To do substitutions in the template files you have to spend a week learning extremely powerful but also extremely complicated autogen format so you could write something like this or this.

Eclipse makes the process even more interesting. There's no application wizard, there's no template format. When you want something like that, you just have to code it in Java by yourself. Easy, isn't it? Choose between org.eclipse.cdt.ui.wizards.NewCProjectWizard, org.eclipse.ui.wizards.newresource.BasicNewResourceWizard or org.eclipse.ui.INewWizard, subclass/implement, write everything else by hand and get something like I got for KDE-Eclipse

KDevelop3 was not really different. Our first template format required you to write a template description and a perl script with installation instructions. Our second template format combined descriptions with processing/installation instructions to the single file. To make things even more interesting, we did not allow to have subdirectories in the templates, so you had to write special subdirectory creation and file copy instructions when you wanted for example to put the main.cpp into /src.

I created several application templates for KDevelop by myself and found that process too complicated and annoying. So when I was working on KDE-Eclipse I thought of ideal template format and soon figured out that a simple tarball is the format of my dream.

Really, why don't application wizard just extract the tarball and so some variable substitutions? I implemented exactly that: extraction + substitution and that worked better than any of those sophisticated template systems I know about.

So when the time had come to implement the application wizard for KDevelop4 I didn't hesitate and did the same thing again. So from now to create an application template for KDevelop4 you just need to:

• have a directory with your project
• place variables in file names and contents
• write very simple .kdevtemplate file with a description like this one
• and pack it

As an example, take a look at our Qt4 application template in the unpacked form.

Of course, the variables that are not known to the application wizard has still to be declared in .kdevtemplate so that user can be asked at project creation time. But the whole thing is still as simple as possible and I will make sure we will stick to KISS principle and won't harry apptemplate developers anymore ;)

IDE's project management features are what everyone can see. Together with advanced language support features, proper build system support is the most prominent feature that differentiates IDE's from various editors, advanced and not.

And proper project management with proper buildsystem support is hard. KDevelop3 was very good at that. Anjuta only recently got close to what our Automake manager had for 4 years. My KDE-Eclipse autotools plugin did get some attention by RedHat guys after I stopped working on it, but I don't know what happened next. Seems like "fedora eclipse" project now superseded it. So even Eclipse doesn't have something on a par yet.

This all means KDevelop's features are still unique. Especially unique is QMake manager which has no alternatives I know about. After Andreas Pakulat took my qmake parser and vastly improved the manager in KDevelop 3.4, we can open and manage the most complex qmake project - the whole Qt library (both 3.x and 4.x versions).

But the time doesn't stop and KDevelop development doesn't stop either. We always wanted to change two things in 3.x - make it possible to open more than one project at a time and avoid code and UI duplication between buildsystem plugins.

As for today, in KDevelop4 we managed to realize our plan. First, Andreas Pakulat implemented support for opening several projects at a time. Second, we used Roberto Raggi's project management architecture with one user-visible "Project Management View" which displays information from various build system managers. That all grants the popular wish to open many projects and solves code maintainability and complexity issues at the same time!

You can see the current state of things in the screenshot below where I've opened two QMake projects using QMake Manager and KDevelop4 project using Generic Manager (CMake Manager is not yet ready). Looks cool, doesn't it? ;)