[rkward-devel] Current developments

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi!

Since it's been a bit more silent on the list the past few weeks, I just 
wanted to give you a short update on the major things that have been going on 
in SVN, recently, and what can be expected, next.

1) There is now a rudimentary file browser. It can open regular text files, 
html files and R workspaces. Any further files will be launched in a separate 
application (if one is registered for that file type).

2) Two new concepts, "include" and "insert" are supported in .xml and .rkh 
files. See 
http://rkward.sourceforge.net/documents/devel/plugins/plugin_series.html for 
some documentation. This can be used to make series of very similar plugins 
much more managable (but also, it has the potential to make things terribly 
complex, if you try to be too clever, as I've found out in some intermediate 
attempts). I've converted the distribution plugins to make use of this, so 
take a look, there, if you like (also perhaps check that I did not break 
anything). Some more could actually be done to factor out common portion in 
the distribution plugins, but for now, I think it's good enough.

3) I've worked a bit one some speed optimizations. Startup time is reduced by 
a tiny amount, by delaying creation the workspace browser until it is first 
shown (and the same is done for the file browser). Invocation time for some 
of the plugins is noticeably reduced by making the color_chooser plugin 
faster (the problem here, was, that the color_chooser plugin is sometimes 
used up to ten times in a single plugin, and each of those instances started 
a separate PHP process, which was quite a bit of overhead for the simple 
functionality it provides).

Please test, if you have the time, as it's always easiest to fix the bugs as 
long as the memory is still fresh...

Some of the things I intend to do next:

a) Finally take care of Illias plugins (esp. making the barplot and chisq.test 
functionality embeddable).
b) Work on improving and prettifying the object viewer (the window that opens 
if you select "View" from the context menu in the workspace browser).
c) Implement the setwd() functionality, discussed on this list, recently.

After that, it's probably time to start worrying about the next release. 
Hence, if you would like to add some more plugins or other things, it would 
be a good idea to try to get this in within the next ten days or so.

Regards
Thomas
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