Friday, February 09, 2007

Onward...

Following the release of the Open Quark Framework (build 1.3.0_0), we are of course hard at work with the next version. So, what is coming next?

We are spending some effort now to move our Eclipse integration forward. The Eclipse support has had to take a lower priority over the core framework since its inception, and is only just now beginning to move beyond a 'rudimentary' phase. With the work on the compiler's static analysis and rewrite optimisations now where we want it to be, we are able to put a little more emphasis on developer tooling and in particular bringing the Eclipse integration up to snuff. To begin with, there are many utilities and tools offered in the CAL shell, ICE, which we are integrating into the Eclipse plugins. This work will improve code browsing and navigation, with language sensitive search and renaming. Automatic import management (organise imports and auto-add 'usings') will be added. Intellicut and code completion will be included in the Eclipse editor. We'll also be adding a metadata editor. Finally, we want to begin integrating the debug capabilities of ICE into Eclipse. The full manifestation of some of our plans for a graphical debugger will take many months, but some basic capabilities should be doable relatively quickly.

Besides Eclipse, the Gem Cutter is continuing to be improved. The Value Panels for records has been improved quite a bit and a record extraction feature has been added to avoid having to use a Code Gem to get access to record fields. CALDoc browsing has also been improved to deal with the hierarchical module names that were a recently added feature of CAL.