Friday 31 July 2009

On Padre's birthday, a gift to you (0.42 released!)


It is with enormous pleasure that I present Padre, the Perl IDE, release #42.

As you may have known from previous posts, this Monday was the 1st anniversary of Padre! Everybody got together over the weekend and several improvements and bugfixes were made. We even got a brand new Padre logo, the Blue Morpho Butterfly. Check it out above!

A few other highlights of the biggest Changelog we had since release 0.21 (weird, huh?!):

  • The Directory Browser is not only prettier, faster and more useful than ever (with a built in search engine and some DWIM behavior) but now also has a panel on the left side of Padre all for itself called "project tools". Alias++ && gabrielmad++.

  • Azawawi++ implemented smart highlighting, and now whenever you double click on a word will not only select it as usual but also show a green squiggle for each mathing word on that same document.

  • Azawawi also got to finish his work on initial support for Padre actions, which means an action can be re-used by anything running on Padre. This will most definitely have a major positive impact on future development of the project.

  • Bricas++ added a "right margin" option which will show a tiny vertical line at the specified column. This is a really cool visual aid if you don't want to get your strings beyond 78 characters or whatever standard you may have. Incidentally, he is also the maintainer of the PerlTidy plugin, which might help you even more on tidying you code.

  • Alias also added two new options: "Close This Project" to close all open files in the same project as the current file, and "Close Other Projects" to do the opposite. Something everybody used to editing several projects at the same time were really looking forward to.

As usual, many thanks are in order to everybody who got involved directly or indirectly in this release of Padre. And make sure to keep bug reports and wishlists coming!

Oh, one more thing: being a special "birthday edition", this release has a commemorative title on the main Padre window. Make sure you drop by #padre on irc.perl.org and help us go through enough changes/fixes so we can release 0.43 even better (and without that title :P)

Enjoy!

Thursday 23 July 2009

Padre 0.41 released!

Wow, not even a week passed and we already have a new version for you!

Aside from the usual bugfixes, Padre 0.41 has the following changes:

  • The deprecated and rarely visible "experimental mode" was completely removed;
  • Ahmad Zawawi++ is doing a huge revamp on Padre's internals (sorry, you'll have to wait for the birthday edition to get all the benefits), and thanks to him now run_command in a separate window works in win32 to support prompt('...') in Perl 6 and in Perl 5;
  • The long awaited find/replace inside selections feature is finally implemented for your refactoring pleasure
  • Also, Gabor Szabo++ created a brand new syntax highlighter configuration system. Plugins now can add more syntax highlighters and users can pick one per mime-type. Some plugins already support this (such as the Parrot and Perl 6 ones) so if you have them enabled you can already change your preferred highlighter (from Scintilla to STD.pm, for example);
  • Last but not least, Gabriel Vieira++ just kept going with his changes on the directory view. This time, not only does Padre got some really nice artwork for folders and files on the tree view, but also users are now able to drag and drop their files around.

With this brand new 0.41 release, we open the gates for this weekend's Padre birthday festival. I'll probably blog about it tomorrow. Until then, hack away :-)

Friday 17 July 2009

Padre 0.40 released!

It is with great pleasure that I announce Padre 0.40 is just fresh out of the oven!

This is a special release of Padre, The Perl IDE, on very different accounts:

  • Adam Kennedy++ ran his new toy (CPANDB with dependency Graphs) on Padre and was able to eliminate about 10 Padre dependencies, including some pretty hairy ones with lots of FAIL reports on CPAN Testers. This not only makes Padre lighter, but also greatly enhances chances of a successful install, and makes it really easier to package.

  • Our newest contributor, Gabriel Vieira++, committed several improvements to the Directory Browser (view -> directory tree), making it way faster and more usable than before.

The brand new Padre 0.40 should arrive at your nearest CPAN mirror in no time. Please report any problems or feature requests to our request tracker or on #padre at irc.perl.org. We're really excited and expecting to do a lot of work now that we're so close to Padre's "birthday release".

As usual, many thanks are also in order to all of Padre's unsung heroes, and just about everyone that helps us directly or indirectly turn it into one of the best IDEs for Perl development out there.


Have fun!

Sunday 12 July 2009

View your templates' structure as a graph

Some very nice visualization tools have emerged on CPAN lately, such as melo++'s MojoX::Routes::AsGraph and franckc++'s CatalystX::Dispatcher::AsGraph. Now, be it Catalyst, Mojolicious, Titanium, Jifty or whatever Perl web framework you use, you most likely use abw++'s amazing Template Toolkit for rendering your site. So I really missed something that would help visualize and untangle the usually complex template structure on a complex website. If you feel that way too, wait no more! :)

use Template::AsGraph

my $graph = Template::AsGraph->graph('mytemplate.tt2');


That's about it. You can also pass TT's configurations and even variables that might mangle with template flow:

Template::AsGraph->graph('template.tt2', \%config, \%vars);

This even lets you get the actual output of the template processing in case you want it as well (you do this with the OUTPUT setting on your config hash, btw).

The result? See for yourself:



Dev code's on github, and the first release should arrive at your local CPAN mirror anytime now.

Let me know what you think!