Accomplishments And Challenges Of The KDevelop Team

Speaker: Alexander Dymo

The talk is about accomplishments of developers working on the last Qt3 based KDevelop 3.4 release and challenges KDevelop team faces with during KDevelop 4 development.

The recent changes of KDevelop 3.4 will be described in detail covering

• new keyboard-navigatable user interface mode
• gdb-mi (machine interface) based debugger
• radical changes to C++ support - brand new code completion engine
• Ruby language support improvements

The overview of KDevelop4 architecture will be given describing KDevelop4 as a Platform for building plugin-based IDE-like applications. Intrinsics of most important KDevelop 4 features will be covered:

• unified build system infrastructure with current Autotools plugin as an example and with discussion on upcoming CMake support features
• code parsing and AST creation with kdevelop-pg using as an example the C# preprocessor, lexer, parser and AST developed this summer as Google SOC project
• language support framework that makes it easy to write new language support plugins for KDevelop with background parser, and also our Google SOC project - the language independent refactoring engine
• new Idea-like UI mode with discussion about already taken and possible user interface solutions
• embedded Qt4 designer which is potentially much more powerful than existing KDevelop Designer
• teamwork mode (our third SOC project) which facilitates the collaboration between project members.

Also the work and ideas on Ruby language support will be discussed, especially ideas on how to make the excellent support for dynamic language programming by implementing "dynamic" code completion and argument hinting. Finally the value of KDevelop as an IDE is discussed and the point of KDevelop Team's view on the future is given.

Alexander Dymo

Alexander Dymo is a KDE developer since 2002 and KDevelop developer since 2003. He has been the release coordinator of KDevelop project for the duration of 3.x releases and still serves as one of KDevelop 4 project maintainers. From June 2006 he works as sponsored part-time KDevelop developer. His other interests include teaching (he's a university lecturer) and science (working on new methods of software development time estimations).

Media

Slides (PDF) (467k)
Video (Ogg) (111M)