[rkward-devel] Current developments

[Stefan Roediger]

Am Donnerstag, 10. Mai 2007 21:14:00 schrieb 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

As mentioned in a private mail, I'll (have to) be "inactive" for the next time 
but going to be back soon. I'll try to help testing.


Regards
Stefan