What's cooking in the EDT kitchen?

As we're incubating the EGL Development Tools (EDT) project, we want to keep everyone informed of our progress. We just finished EDT 0.8.0 (see our earlier post), and have started work on EDT 0.8.1.

We're trying to make it easier for more people and companies to use and contribute to the EDT community. You can find high-level plans on our wiki, or query Bugzilla for a low-level view which shows all of the enhancements currently planned for 0.8.1, though the list will grow during the lifetime of the release. (You can add the Target Milestone to the results using the Change Columns link below the list.)  We realize reading through Bugzilla query results isn't everyone's cup of tea, so we'll also post a weekly progress report (like this post) on the blog to help answer to the question "What are they working on?"

At the moment, we're working on the first of three milestones for the 0.8.1 release. The three main themes of this release are:

• IDE usability - EGLAR support, source code analysis
• Extensibility - improved extensibility of the compiler, generators, runtimes, and the deployment process
• Language - implement more of the language in our generators and runtimes

Here's the list of what we worked on last week. It's meant to be short and sweet, so I don't mention the names of the developers, provide links to Bugzilla, or include estimates of when unfinished work will be done. Also, every week we're fixing defects, answering questions on the forum, writing documentation, etc. so I'm not going to mention those things here.

IDE Usability

• Design and review the specification for EGLAR support
• Read RBD's code for EGLARs
• Investigate EGLAR project explorer

Extensibility

• Prototype validation extensibility
• Investigate runtime modularization: split runtimes into functional segments, generators add what is required during generation or deployment

Language

• Added compiler support for bitwise operators and new types (bytes, time, limited string)
• Update to content assist for the new types
• Compiler support for foreach loop on arrays
• Added bitwise operators, time and limited string types in Java
• Added a validation check about passing nullable values
• Work on JavaScript debug's label support
• Wrote a design for EGLDoc (like Javadoc for EGL)
• Investigate changing the compiler to keep comments (necessary for EGLDoc)

Other

• Investigate integrating with new mobile technologies

We hope these weekly reports will help you stay informed about what's cooking in the EDT kitchen and spark your interest to join the other EDT chefs, or at least try out the resulting dish, I mean downloads.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you on the EDT forum.

Matt