Five Minutes :: What I Did With My Winter Holidays, Part 3

Short ~~Summer~~ Winter of Code update this time, since I'm tired and don't have much to report that's going to be all that interesting. Reasonable progress has been made since the last update, and I'm basically done with the communication library for now, which has reasonable code-level documentation, reasonable unit test coverage, and has a @todo:file ratio of less than 1.0. Derick raised a good point about the wxWidgets dependency (the library depends on 2.8 for the XML parsing, but many distros are still shipping 2.6 and are unlikely to change until new versions come out, so Debian users are in trouble for a while), but I don't think it's something I can deal with at the moment given the time constraints, so the first version's going to require 2.8, and I'll revisit it after that to look at using libxml2.

The next step is therefore to work on the GUI. Tomorrow, assuming my car is dealt with one way or the other reasonably early in the day, I'm going to sit down and start working on the layout and workflows -- initially in my usual first draft manner involving a pen and a notebook, then progressing to some mock-ups in wxFormBuilder. There are obviously quite a few reasonably good graphical debuggers out there now, and I don't intend to deviate too far from the mould, but I think it'd be remiss if I didn't at least work through it myself to see if I have any bright ideas. (In other words, no, it won't be any different from the norm.)

It's also mid-term evaluation week, as I'm sure every student is keenly aware. This year the evaluation has taken the form of a survey, which wasn't quite what I was expecting, both in form and content. It's not a particularly difficult survey to fill out, but some of the questions were related to the community, which is something that I'm not really connected to -- this project is quite distinct from the PHP project proper, and I don't think there's a strong community it does belong to. I think about a quarter of my answers ended up using some sort of construction along the lines of I don't really feel that I have much to say about this, but..., which I suspect will probably get me a smack (even if only karmically) from somebody at Google.

So, that's that. Next time: pretty screenshots! Singing and dancing! Cowbell!

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