BoxFactory Development Log 3

Small update here to say that I tagged v0.1 for BoxFactory.

What's new?

Bundles and AppDirs

Well, first numbered release, but as I use semver, this could still mean compatibility breaking to come. I symbolically made a tag, as BoxFactory can now make proper compilations on Linux and Mac OS X, including Application Bundles on OS X and AppDir for ROX-Filer.

Implementation of ROX-Filer AppDirs allowed me to think of a structure that would not be specifically limited to Mac OS X. It also allowed me to not have to go to a Mac to test my ideas. Furthermore, I really like ROX-Filer and it is my file-manager since quite a while; it is nice to know that it is easy to generate these kind of applications right now.

What's to come?

Project generation

This was the first milestone I set myself to achieve. The second one (and only other I have right now) is to get Project generation up-and-running. This means that now I have to find out what kind of project we want, study their formats and implement generator functions for them.

For this to work, I will certainly need to make the configure steps that are still TODO. I will then have to work a structure to do effective project generation.

Off the top of my head, I have those projects to do for the milestone:

They are the IDEs that are used at Anhero, then we'll be able to officially deprecate our CMakeLists.txt files from our projects. Once this is done, we'll keep them for the next tagged version and after that, we will remove them.

Fear not, CMake aficionados, one of the project files I want to support is some kind of CMakeLists.txt generation; We have libraries that we are developing and would still like people to have the freedom to use CMake to include them. It will allow us to not update CMakeLists.txt manually and simply generate them when needed.

When all this is done, I don't know for sure what will come for BoxFactory, but I know that for project generation, I would like to add support for those environments:

They are, I think, widely-used IDEs, supporting them are a must for adoption of either BoxFactory or our RedBox Engine project.

Other compilers and things

For C++ and linking, I will need to implement Visual Studio support. I will then need to work on implementing other things into BoxFactory.

I want to be able to package BoxFactory using BoxFactory. I will also need BoxFactory to have a step for generating documentation. Ideally, it should generate the DoxyFile at runtime.

I want also to port carew to BoxFactory; I mean, using the overall framework of BoxFactory to generate sites. I don't know if carew would be integrated entirely into BoxFactory or simply using it. Anyway, this is something I have as a low-priority idea.

About Windows

Windows is currently untested. In theory, nothing stops it from working, but there is no platform implementation for Windows, thus it needs to be implemented.

I will work on it during the next milestone. It is not as pressing as Linux and OS X for working on our projects, but it is still highly necessary for releasing our different projects.