Some of you may know that for quite some time, on and off, I am working on a rewrite of WonderBrush, the graphics tool that comes bundled with Haiku releases. Since I have last demonstrated the prototype publically, I have occasionally found the time to work on it some more. I’ve ported over most brush tool related code from the original WonderBrush. And in the past weeks, I have specifically worked on a new text tool (written from scratch).
Hi,
as part of my PhD thesis at the Uni Auckland I would like to do a web survey about Stack & Tile.
Stack & Tile (S&T) is an extension of the window manager used in HAIKU. S&T allows the user to stack windows on top of one other or tile windows beside each other.
With the questionnaire we would like to gather some information about how and how often people are using S&T.
First of all, I apologize for the delay. I have now returned from my vacation,
had a few days to settle in and explain to my neighbours that I'm not dead (!).
Anyways, on to the interesting stuff.
On the surface, the status of things is mostly the same as in my last report,
with a few bugs less. I thought I had dedicated more than enough time for
bugfixing, but that turned out to not be the case. This is partly due to the
slower development cycle when testing natively (compile, copy driver to image,
boot virtual machine, test, repeat), and the bugs only showing up after doing
several resizes with other IO going on. All the bugs of this kind that I know
about have been eliminated.
To summarize the things I have accomplished during the summer:
- Resize support in BFS driver, save for vnode mapping and growing a full
file system.
- Getting the resizing "pipeline" from userspace to driver to a working
state (still needs some checking to verify that it's robust).
Recently I spend some time to develop ALE the Auckland Layout Editor and now it’s getting time to release a first testing version! ALE is a tool for developers to create GUIs. These GUIs can then be loaded from an application. This first version is still very basic and I hope I can get some feedback what can be improved and which features are most needed. It mainly focus on layout creation and less on editing view properties.
Friday, August 24th marked the end of
Google Summer of Code 2012.
This was the sixth year that the Haiku project participated
and was one of 180 fellow mentoring organizations.
This year, five of 1,212 students were mentored by Haiku.
To give a frame of reference to the competitiveness in Google Summer of Code,
over 400 mentoring organizations and over 4,000 students applied to participate.
For both mentoring organizations (and students), it is an honor and pleasure
to be selected in Google Summer of Code.
For those not in the know, Google Summer of Code is "a global program
that offers student developers stipends to write code for various
open source software projects". In other words, simply by being one
of the mentoring organizations, many youthful computer-savvy students
may learn about HAIKU for the first time. For a carefully selected few,
they have the opportunity to receive priority from our mentors in
teaching them how to develop software for Haiku. This is a unique opportunity,
as there is no other outreach effort of this magnitude available to the Haiku project.
Since the three-quarter term report, I have continued porting userland servers and apps. The app server is fully functional, as are Deskbar and Tracker and a few other apps. I also cross-compiled all of the basic development optional packages (GCC/Binutils, autotools, make, etc.) for x86_64. Another screenshot showing the current state of things is below:
the last quarter term is mostly spent on acpi cpuidle driver implementation. I also spent about 2 days to adjust the cpuidle framework so that the cpuidle generic module is loaded by lowlevel cpuidle driver, while the later will be loaded during boot up either by bus enumeration or calling get_module() manually. I also tested the power after acpi cpuidle driver is finished. The result is as good as intel native one.
Since my three-quarter term report I’ve been working on adding audio input support to the jsound port and fixing various bugs in the JDK. Since the AWT/Java2d and jsound ports are now completed, my goals for the summer have been accomplished! The OpenJDK port is now in a fairly usable state, and community members have been using it to run some large scale Swing apps such as NetBeans and ThinkFree office.
The next thing I would like to do is merge my work in to the Haiku port repository at the OpenJDK project. From there I’d like to look into the possibility of acquiring access to the Java TCK, which will allow for comprehensive testing of the port. This will no doubt uncover many bugs and keep me busy for a while. Here are some other possible areas of expansion for the future:
Since three quarter term I've added NFS-level support for named attributes what means that virtually all important NFS version 4 feature are now implemented, as I described them in my blog posts during the coding period. What still needs to be done is to improve support of Haiku's extended attributes and a lot of bugfixing. There is also a room for performance improvement and several possibilities to organize code in a better way.
