Peter Lavender

Normally when Padre, the Perl IDE is released, we like to let people know about it through the release announcement. It serves a dual purpose. it both lets us acknowledge the awesome work that goes into Padre while letting everyone out there see what has changed, what has been fixed and where we are in terms of the project and whether or not it's ready for your use, or to upgrade.

0.90 was released with little fanfare, so I'd like to take the time now to cover off some of the changes in Padre 0.90 in a little more depth.

OK, so I can't help myself here, but with the work done by Ahmad Zawawi to bring us a modern Scintilla with the Wx::Scintilla package, we now get squiggles!

Squiggles are totally awesome and really a sign of a modern editor, here you can see I'm following Kartik Thakore's SDL tutorial and made an error in the initialisation parameters, this is with the Solarize Dark Editor Style contributed by Anton Ukolov ('sugar' on irc).

To use the the new Scintilla text editor in Padre, install the latest Wx::Scintilla through your cpan client of choice, then in Padre itself, go to Tools/Preferences and click on the Advanced Settings button. From there scroll down to feather_scintilla_enable and set it to true, save the changes and restart Padre.

Adam Kennedy continues work on the internals of Padre, refactoring and improving various API's in the march towards 1.0 and a more stablised internal API.

Some of this work includes the major FBP effort and using more dynamic dialogs witin Padre generated by using wxGlade and converting to Perl code. With the changes made recently we have a number of Plugins in need of some attention to remove any old dependencies on the old "static" Padre dialogs. If you are seeing some of the plugins no longer working this is likely the cause, so let the authors know by raising a ticket in RT.

Andrew Bramble has appeared from where ever it is that parents with young kids go to add a few fixes and pick up on the Swarm code, keeping up with the API changes of recent times.

Sebastian Willing fixed a number of bugs, including the one from 0.88 where hitting enter on a blank line added one extra new line. I thought I was going crazy when I first saw this happen. Sebastian also added in a new test to check trac for any "blocker" priority issues, which I have to say was a neat inclusion and may well have prevented releasing 0.88 with that rather annoying bug.

Olivier 'dolmen' Mengué fixed up the Padre icon for Unity users, which I have to say thanks, it looks so much better now.

Our translators also came to the party with updates to German and French by Zeno Gantner and Olivier.

Padre 0.90 still has some bumps and warts, however it's a worthwhile upgrade for anyone who is running 0.88.

The next few releases of Padre will be an interesting and potentially bumpy ride as we go through the necessary improvements to Padre's internals. For the most part any release that has any potential issue you'll be well warned. We've been done this path before with a number of releases being put out as "Unstable" and try with caution warnings.

We'll see if we do this again, or try something different on the way to Padre 1.0.

As always, feel free to drop on in the irc channel #padre on irc.perl.org.

If you have a question, ask away, we can't always answer your question straight away, as we don't know who is awake at the time, typically though there is generally someone around or around soon after that may be able to answer you there and then, however for the most part, it can take a while before someone responds. Don't take it as a sign of an unfriendly crowd, it really does just depend on what time of day it is and who is online at the time.