Sidetracked!

Hi,

Ok, after an initally promising start with the android target (I can compile/build/link stuff now…but it’s all very hacky) I decided to suspend work on that for a while in order to finish up the module manager system, which is IMO only really half-finished right now – pretty much like every other module manager I’ve ever attempted.

Android is still happening, but it will be a Big Job and right now I think getting a useful module manager system togther is more important, as people are starting to write some really cool stuff in mx2.

The current module upload system works fine IMO, but without some way of being able to update/install modules ‘in’ Ted2 as easily as possible, it’s all kind of redundant – users may as well just download the zip from the project repos if they are required to unzip/install/updatemods etc manually.

So I set about adding a module manager dialog to ted2, which really needs some come of TableView – something mojox (the micro-gui used by ted2) didn’t have. And things kind of snowballed from there – since I was tweaking mojox I decided I might as well clean it up a bit and turn it into a standalone module, given that a few people have shown some interest in actually using it. And I may have got a bit carried with that…

I also ended up making some tweaks to Ted2 using some of the new mojox features as I added them, eg: draggable/closable tabs, right-click popup menu in the file tree to create/delete files/dirs (miss that so much from ted1!), and a tidy up of the secret-no-longer helptree so it works like the online searchable treeview. F1 now also attempts to bring up some meaningful help for the current keyword – nothing fancy, basically just an index search.

I also moved the html help view to the same pane as the console (which is now tabbed) which I thinks works pretty well. You have to drag the splitter up to see the whole page, but that can go on a hot key and it’s definitely nice having docs/code visible at the same time some. You frequently only want to see a declaration anyway, and having that pop up in a little window at the bottom of the page works well I think.

Anyway, the actual module manager is now going quite nicely I think. You can select modules to update/install from a module manager dialog in ted2, and the download/unzip/copy/updatemods/updatedocs stuff is all done for you. It also makes a backup of the modules you are modifying before making any changes in case something goes wrong (mostly I’m thinking updatemods here…).

It’s pretty simple – no update depedancy checking yet, and it’d be nice to be able to rollback multiple times not just once, but IMO it’s a good start.

I hope to commit this work early next week. I did plan on commiting more as I went, but given some of changes I was making, getting mojo+mojox+ted2 working together sweetly has been a bit of a volatile process and I didn’t want to commit too much stuff that could well disappear tomorrow or break something I haven’t tested with. Perhaps I was overly cautious here? Or perhaps I should have done all this work on a branch…

Bye!
Mark