[Adept Development System] Adept Progress Report - First Pass Complete
Paul Marrington
So I've had a couple of months between contracts. Naturally, I've been spending quite a bit of time applying for every contract in sight, but the rest of my time has ben devoted to completing Iteration 1 of Adept. I have to say, it's looking good. It's not ready for Source Forge release yet - that won't be until the end of the year - but I've reached major milestone. I'm ready to use the result in anger.
The panelling system is complete. It's now possible to attach panels to each other or the edge of the desktop, and to create tiles as well as the panels' native drag-and-resizeable window style. Any desktop or panel can have a menu built up from multiple sources - beneath the standard File/Edit/Window/Help top-level menus. Any application running under Adept will have at least two desktops - the primary desktop and one for the specific application. As of this iteration, the primary desktop finally allows for launching of the application - and later it'll be filled with useful tools such as notes, alarms, calender, link collections, etc.
So it's time to get the ball rolling. To prove the viability of Adept I'm starting on the first commercial application that will use it - Budget Adept. Why a budget program? I've been budgeting my small business and household using a spreadsheet for the last three years, and I'm definitely a budget convert. I see the value and exactly how much I'm saving. More importantly, the way my budget system works is fundamentally different to the methods I have used in the past while using Quicken (and a brief, horrifying jaunt into MS Money). I believe I know enough now to create a kick-ass budget program.
From an Adept perspective, once this application is ready for release I can be quite confident that Adept is solid enough for use in the real world outside my office. Then I can take the time to release it on Source Forge - so you should look Budget Adept in early 2006. (nb: if you can't wait, drop me a line and I'll let you have a pre-release copy)
I don't really imagine I'll get far with Budget Adept before I'll be back to tweaking and adding much-needed features to Adept. For example, while Adept already has basic form handling, I'll need to add list handling. I'll also need to integrate date and tree-shaped reference lists. Point is, once I've implemented a working core for Budget Adept, I can start testing it while I flesh out the complete system.
The next phase will be in producing production code from Adept. This involves compiling under gcj and resolving all the issues that will arise. Then there's browser compatibility - it currently works fine under Mozilla/Firefox, and is designed to work under IE6 also, but there are sections that are so far untested in this environment. It's always more difficult to work under IE as this environment has nothing to match Venkman for debugging (that I've found, anyway).
Those are just a few of the latest highlights for Adept and Budget Adept - more as things progress.
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Posted by Paul Marrington to Adept Development System at 7/19/2005 08:55:00 PM