Draft: Release announcement

[Andreas Pakulat]

Hi,

as we really want to make a splash with the 4.0 release I've dedicated
some more time and words this time for the announcement, based on the
feedback I gathered and what I know myself from using it :)

The attached file is what I have right now, hope the placeholders are
understandable for everybody. Please comment.

I'm planning to do some screenshots for KDevelop over the weekend and
put them together into a blog entry on Sunday before posting the
dot-article. I'd like to ask Niko and Milian to send in a few for PHP
support (and php-docs) and everybody else is invited too to take that
off my shoulders ;)

I'm thinking about maybe 10 screenshots showing a bit of everything plus
maybe 4 for PHP... 

So, as I said, time until Sunday to comment on the announcement and make
improvements/screenshots. That way the dot-editors have enough time for
proof-reading.

Andreas

-- 
You will forget that you ever knew me.
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The KDevelop Hackers are proud and happy to announce that KDevelop 4.0 is
finally available as stable release. Together with this the first release
of the PHP plugins is available too, which makes KDevelop interesting for PHP
developers

KDevelop 4.0 comes with lots of features already, even though we had to drop
some things from the 3.5 series. In particular we have focussed on building an
excellent C++ IDE instead of trying to integrate the 10th language. Of course
its still possible to add support for more languages to KDevelop and I think
its actually easier than in KDevelop3, the best proof for that is the PHP
plugin that is released alongside KDevelop 4.0.

The major features for C++ support including semantic highlighting, code
navigation allowing you to jump to declarations and uses very easily. Support
for syntax checking and semi-automatic code-correction with assistants is
included as well as code completion that supports classes, variables, function
and includes. For the Qt developers among us there is extensive support for the
signal/slot mechanisms in Qt, meaning you get signal-completion in connect
statements as well as completion for matching slots, depending on the arguments
of the signal.

For the project management we currently have CMake support as the main
buildsystem plugin, building projects with custom makefiles or with generated
makefiles is possible to though. The CMake support also has some of the above
features available so you'll get some completion and semantic highlighting as
well as code-navigation even in CMake files. Integration between C++ and CMake
allows to create classes which are added to targets in CMake files
semi-automatically. To ease the fixing of build errors KDevelop allows to jump
to the errors in the code.

The integrated gdb support makes it possible to find the runtime errors you may
have in your codebase. It allows for the usual features like breakpoints, stepping,
stopping and inspecting the current call stack. Additionally through the use of
special pretty-printing support in gdb we can show many Qt types in a
human-readable form. So your QString's will show up with their actual string
literal in the variable list, a QList will have an expandable set of child
items and so on.

The last great feature of KDevelop I'd like to mention is integration of
documentation. Both for CMake and Qt KDevelop shows inline API documentation in
the tooltips for classes and functions and it allows to navigate in the Qt
documentation via a toolview.

The first release of the PHP language support plugin for KDevelop comes already
with a wealth of features that take some of the burden of a developer:

Syntax errors get reported as you type and the sources of whole projects get
semantically analyzed, including PHP Doc comments  for type hints of
parameters and return values. Furthermore it will give you extensive code
completion, with solid support for OOP. We give you context browsing with
inline information about types and variables, a class browser, integrated
PHP.net documentation and proper semantic syntax highlighting.

There are many more things to discover in KDevelop and the PHP plugins, like
svn integration with editor-inline annotation information, grepping over files,
session support and source code formatting. Far too much for a short article
like this, so I've created a dedicates blog entry to show off some of the
features: <a>myblog</a>

I invite everybody to get a copy of the source code from <a>KDE mirrors</a> and
wish a happy hacking session. If you run into problems or have questions don't
hesitate to contact us either in #kdevelop on freenode, via bugs.kde.org or
<a>our mailinglists</a>