Friday, April 08, 2005

Update - Better than I thought

I am realy moving along... I have nearly finished testing the CoreList component and remove alot some small and some large bugs. OK... the changes: These are the following components to be coded this week: CoreObject - Deals with generic objects. CoreFile - Deals with file stream based objects (you can read/write/copy/resize the stream) CoreOwner - Deals with the owner relationships of an object (parent objects) CoreMember - Deals with the member relationships of an object (child objects) CoreObject/CoreOwner and CoreMember are about 4 public functions each while CoreFile has about 9 functions. These components are very easy and they are the next step at finding bugs in the CoreList/CoreItem components. I realy feel that the train is moving... I have passed the main hard part (the start) and the next hard part is only at the end of the kernel in the multi-tasking part. I would like to thank all the MSN users who are helping me along the way. I couldn't do it without you. OK... So about the open-source bit: The Screens kernel (Core) will be released open-source with documentation and the API (so you can start writing applications using the object storage) . I think it will be GPL but I dont know yet (I need to examine the licence). The reason for this is so that developers can port the kernel to other platforms and the second reason is to show developers that this project is serious stuff. I know many of you will think that the code is small and not very complicated but thats the point. It took me alot of time to get to the simplicity of the kernel or to even agree on the object storage design. When will it be released? No idea... but I think the multi-tasking part should be in about 2 months to be coded & tested. The multi-tasking part is the final hard part in the kernel but is also one of the great parts about it. It will also be very easy to code for the kernel, you wont need to know how to code shared libraries or anything like that. You code a normal PalmOS application but intercept the Screens launch code. You will able to use your normal PalmOS compiler and the API is C/C++ compatible. You include ScrCore.hpp and ScrCore.cpp in your application and call the Core functions. The kernel is quite limited at the moment but the limitations will be removed before I release the kernel.

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