Future of Sphere: split development of engine and editor+config

March 20, 2013, 02:01:30 pm

Right now, the Sphere source distribution is a mishmash of the engine, the editor, and the configurator. I think this was one of the key points preventing new devs from coming in and contributing to any particular aspect of the thing. Radnen's concentration on a new editor and Flying Jester's concentration on re-engineering the engine to use V8 JavaScript instead of SpiderMonkey JavaScript proved that if focus is applied to one aspect of the overarching Sphere project then devs of any decent experience level can come in and contribute something worthwhile that gets finished (or as close to finished as we're going to have).

While there are some interdependent parts between the three apps, I believe the logical move to advance development of the engine, and inevitably the project as a whole, is to split up the source, therefore split the repo into three. Once alpha123's advancement of the base Sphere engine to version 1.7 is complete and gold, such a project separation will be instituted to allow implicit focus on development of a particular portion of Sphere to happen. I'm creating empty repos on https://github.com/sphere-group and anyone who wants to start getting the appropriate code into repos immediately can pull and if not already a member of sphere-group can send a pull request.

Sphere development will be split into the following:

Engine
Editor
Config
Tools (eg, tools like the font converter that used to be separate from the editor but then rolled into it)
Doc (for format docs, helpfile, API docs, etc)

If you have a GitHub account, let me know if you're interested in being part of any of these development teams!

(retitled to sync w/other "Future of Sphere" posts/articles ~neo)

Re: Splitting development of the engine and editor+config

Reply #1 – March 21, 2013, 12:37:03 pm

I'd like to have write access to sphere-doc.

Speaking of which, maybe it would be nice to have a Javadoc-style API reference for Sphere functions. Or something generated from the wiki (as soon as it's got the API documentation again).

Re: Splitting development of the engine and editor+config

Reply #2 – March 22, 2013, 10:08:16 am

Added to sphere-doc. Re generating from the wiki, I plan on installing the PDFBook extension once I speak to Dom abt ghostscript and other dependencies so we can theoretically generate a PDF from a collection of articles.