Peter Lavender

As already mentioned by others, Padre 0.88 is out.

This is the culmination of quite a long development cycle since the last release. This was made longer than it should have been due to the discovery of a bug not long after I had branched version 0.88 from trunk.

The release was then held up while people got to sorting out the problem at the time, which in turn saw more work done and more of the internals changing until it got to the point that it made sense to merge all changes in the branch ( all of them translations by our hard working translators ) back to trunk with a new branch taken for the 0.88 release.

Normally in the release announcement I take you through the changes and bugs fixes to be found in the release at the time, this is typically done by taking the Changes from the Padre distribution and grouping together various changes people have made to give a "face" to the name.

As the release manager and tasked with making the announcements that go with the upload of Padre to CPAN, it's my chance to highlight the work of others who freely give up their time improving a tool that I like to use whenever I want to write Perl, well Perl that isn't done at work, that's done using a syntax highlighting text editor. I really miss Padre's functionality when that happens.

However Padre 0.88 has a lot of changes from 0.86, too many changes to break out as I normally do, so instead, I'll cover off on things from a "higher view".

First off is a hello and welcome to Padre to Tom. He's rapidly becoming our Mac Man, hot on the heels of Padre 0.88 came a dmg for Mac OS along with a call to Mac using Perl coders for comment's bug reports etc.

Tom has taken on the significant task of finally getting a working and easy to install Padre for Mac OS.

Ahmad Zawawi got married during this release, congrats Ahmad!

What blows me away is that his contributions continue to roll in. Ahmad has taken it upon himself to port the later versions of Scintilla, released on CPAN as Wx::Scintilla, in such a way that if you have Wx::Scintilla installed and you set the feature in Padre's config, you get the new Scintilla as the editor.

Now this was something we covered off in the previous release announcement,however Ahmad has now gone further and is now tracking the latest Scintilla.

Another "new name", not really but since I need the segue I'm taking liberty here! Kevin Dawson is proving that you don't have to commit lots of code to make a real difference. bowtie, as he's known in irc is proving to have a real knack of keeping the developers on their toes, with just the right mix of nag and persistence. It's a pleasure to watch!

He's also done a lot in terms of documenting Padre design and features via a series of "cookbook" style entries on the Padre wiki which should assist with introducing new programmers to Padre's workings for the plugins.

This is work that always needs to be done, documentation really is the hardest thing to do in projects like this.

Adam Kennedy ( Alias ) has already noted the significant changes in Padre's internals. The "we" in his blog post is really very gracious, the truth is Adam continually puts his hands into the gory guts of Padre and always seems to come away with some memory saving or some performance improvement, along the way breaking a few things, which in turn need further fixing which in turn sees Padre's memory foot print or performance improve again.

The Changes file exemplifies the work that Adam continues to find time for, along with keeping up some fitness for his second job as a roller derby umpire. Seriously, a geek surrounded by crazy women on roller skates, the imagery in my mind is priceless! I just hope they treat him gently, he is one of our alpha coders for sure, but when it comes to skates, mad women, a confined ring and contact sports.... where's a geek got to run when you make a bad call as a ref??

Chuckles aside, Andrew Bramble popped in after a long absence, with a young family it's always hard to find time to waste on outside things, and finished off/cleaned up, the initial work to get Padre to store parts of it configuration "in the cloud".

Code named Madre, you sign up to the server, set Padre up to sync parts of your config to it, so when you move to a different computer you can sync those settings back, keeping Padre's setting the same no matter where you are.

This is still early work but quite functional, however if you want to know more, drop by the #padre irc channel for more information, if you are brave enough though, you will find the "feature_sync" setting in Padre's Advanced settings dialog. Go to Tool -> Preferences.

Gabor committed a few bug fixes and changes for this release. All of this on top of normal work, Perl advocacy, Perl screencasts and generally being an all round busy perl guy.

Thanks to the translators who some how managed to figure out my link to the release branch was in fact wrong and updated Padres languages for 0.88.

Overall this release represents a lot of improvements to Padre, along the way fixing bugs and suboptimal implementations, improvements to functionality and usefulness in your coding work flow.

As always you can find most of us in the #padre channel on irc.perl.org. Feel free to stop by and say hi, or request a feature or complain about a bug or something not working as you'd have expected it to. Keep in mind that the #padre channel has people in there from all parts of the globe, so some of us may be sleeping or working, so if you have a question, please hang around long enough to allow someone to respond.

Thanks to everyone, whether mentioned directly here or not, who has contributed to making Padre what it is today, a very capable Perl IDE. If you haven't got years of memory muscle trained into your wrists for your editor of choice and are looking for a Perl IDE to write code, you won't go too far wrong with Padre,the Perl IDE.