Monday, August 03, 2009

July Summary

Another month, another post about progress in wxWidgets development. The most important recent change was covered by a separate post recently and I won't return to it but just say that wxLog is much nicer to use now in general and it's possible to use it effectively in multi-threaded programs, unlike before.

Other changes were mostly bug fixes (including a few important ones in wxSocket, but unfortunately it still seems broken under Mac, so I'll have something to announce the next month :-) and minor feature improvements. A huge patch globally replacing all occurrences of _T() macro with wxT()was applied so we finally got rid of one nastiness in wx code which is always nice (_T() is still available for user code for compatibility reasons though). And I also started working on wxInfoBar but it isn't quite done yet so this will be something for the next month again.

Except for this the most exciting new development wasn't actually in wxWidgets itself at all but outside of it when Ben Williams (AUI author) announced wxWebConnect availability. I didn't have time to try it myself yet but it definitely looks very promising and should allow to easily embed a modern HTML rendering engine (Gecko in this case) in wxWidgets applications. This opens quite a few possibilities, especially with the new features of HTML5 some of which are already implemented in Gecko.

As for the rest, as I can now use git as wxWidgets svn client, I also can use git shortlog which makes writing summaries simpler, e.g. here is the number of commits to the trunk per author:
  1. Vadim Zeitlin (129)
  2. Stefan Csomor (22)
  3. Jaakko Salli (14)
  4. Kevin Ollivier (4)
  5. Mike Wetherell (3)
  6. Vaclav Slavik (3)
  7. Jouk Jansen (2)
  8. Paul Cornett (1)
  9. Robert Roebling (1)
So you can see that in addition to my own changes which I described above, some work was done on OS X port and wxPropertyGrid. What can't be seen from here is that there were also several changes on 2.9.0 branch and a lot of ones in the topical GSoC branches.

Finally my script for analysing Trac statistics reports 109 new tickets and 67 closed ones of which 8 were reopened. So our goal of closing all the tickets didn't advance much this month neither -- help with them would be welcome!