Summary of coding achievements
After a long silence (in busy times one forgets to update a website) we’re ready to letting you know how the Lumiera project is doing. Because, well, there’s a lot going on. What you are now reading is the first of our quarterly reports in which we tell about the progressions made in the past three months.
As you might know, the development of Lumiera has been divided into three sections: backend, proc-layer and GUI. Due to circumstances work on the backend and GUI parts have slowed down a bit.
For the backend this was caused by the amount of work it took to get NoBug (Lumiera’s debugging library, used for logging, diagnosis and detection of misaligned resource handling) and uWiki (our wiki-engine) up and running.
uWiki is finally ready to use, though in a very basic shape. It now needs a herd of web developers dedicated to improve it. Andreas Hermann Braml (aka pseudoruprecht) already started looking after it. Since uWiki is very modular, contributions can be managed very easily and tasks can be added on demand. Any contributor is welcome (hint hint!).
Core programmer Christian Thaeter (aka cehteh) is now back working at NoBug. This testsuite has now its own documentation, though still uncompleted; hence the fact that we are looking for volunteers to complete it. The next NoBug release (with a much improved testsuite) will be out soon, as part of the Lumiera development.
Once this is finished (sometime soon) cehteh will continue to work on the backend, which is in the following state:
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Plugin loading and interface system works (but still lacks a lot of features).
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The config/preferences system is also working in a restricted way, but usable enough for now. Simeon Völkel (aka SimAV) is working on improving it.
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Basic file handling in the backend is working.
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Thread management is in a mockup, but working state.
Work on the GUI will continue soon too, once developer Joel Holdsworth (aka Joelholdsworth) can dedicate some more time to it (he appears to have a busy job). Leaves us with the proc-layer, where some major progression has been booked by core programmer Hermann Vosseler (aka ichthyo). After finishing the front-end of the command system, serving to dispatch any operation initiated from GUI (or scripts) cleanly into the Proc-Layer, research in how to connect the proc-layer to the GUI has led to the creation of a system of nested scopes, backed by an index. This PlacementIndex will be used by the Session to keep track of the Placements and the MObjects these Placements refer to. Together, they form the core of the session the user is working with through the GUI. For a more detailed description of these systems and how they work together I refer to the in-depth documentation that’s currently in the Tiddlywiki.
Other great news is that a new core programmer joined the Lumiera project! We welcome Michael Ploujnikov (aka Plouj), who already helped the Lumiera project writing programming documentation and who’ll now be working on the Thread Pool.
For more information on development you can visit the mailing list archives. Also, take a look at the Roadmap.
Work on Lumiera will continue at full-speed again. Cehteh will continue to work on the backend, and Ichthyo will first finish the Proc/GUI connection and then change to the "bottom side" of proc-layer to work towards the backend connection.
Since Lumiera is still underpowered, we’re looking into ways of attracting new coders/developers. One of these ways is by visiting conferences, like the past FrOSCon 09.
Currently we’re looking into attending the upcoming Linux Audio Conference (May 1-4, 2010 in Utrecht, The Netherlands), among others.
Furthermore this site at lumiera.org will be re-structured, so it’ll be easier for both new and current developers to find information/documentation about the project. This also includes an improved design and layout.
Keep checking lumiera.org for updates, join our mailing list or give us a visit on IRC at #lumiera (Freenode).