Our favorite app_server developer, the one and only DarkWyrm, has been busy lately incorporating a lot of nice features (such as
AntiGrain Geometry.) into the application server for Haiku, and he has a lot to say about his work.
Code changes,
cvs commits, and new technology that will make
Haiku stand apart are merely some of the beginnings we will see with the future of Haiku. Thanks to the hard work of DarkWyrm, Adi, Stippi, Axel, and more, we will soon realize our dream of an open source BeOS, that we all contributed to in some way, shape or form.
For the following screenshots I took the liberty of hosting them locally, rather than link directly to the original locations. We have the bandwidth to spare for images like these, so its all good. :P
Here's a brief snippet from DarkWyrm's post over at
http://darkwyrm.beemulated.net/:
... I mentioned back in November that the server would be incorporating the AntiGrain Geometry vector graphics library, and it very much is under way. Stephen Assmus, author of the excellent graphics package WonderBrush, has been using his expertise to write code that will be integrated into the app_server to do the actual rendering. This is really good because there are all sorts of tricks that AGG does that we will be able to take advantage of for R2 and have features that no other operating system has. Here is a screenshot of the app that he has been working on to test the code. It should give you an idea of what kind of quality the server is going to have.
This new code will fix quite a few things which have been broken or unimplemented for a while, most notably being the ability to clip text to a specific area of the screen and many of the different drawing modes. I intend this server graphics code to also become a BBitmapUtils class which will allow a person to draw on a BBitmap, thus providing developers on R5 a way to work around a problem R5 has with creating too many BBitmaps which accept BViews to draw on them. It will probably also become a testing ground for future API improvements, such as OS-level support for SVG graphics, gradients, and kewl things like text along a curved path.
At the moment, I've been working on investigating how all of this backend needs to fit with the server. Also, for those people who doubt that the server has always been in a state of being broken and will never work, this screenshot is a side-by-side comparison of a test application running under R5 with the exact same test code running in the Haiku server. This weekend was spent retooling BFont and the classes used inside the server for working with fonts, including the FontServer class. There is still a lot of work to be done, but most of the hard stuff is already done. BCheckBoxes are *this* close to displaying properly -- they depend on some font code to look right, so this is a Good Thing (TM). ...
It is certainly starting to get exciting as we see development after development arrive, slowly but surely. Personally, I'm starting to get that same tingle I had when BeOS R4.5 came out. You know the feeling. Its that baited-breath-what-will-Be-think-of-next type of feeling, you just want to show off your computer because its able to run this awesome operating system that none other can make your hardware scream with glee feeling...
Yes. It is getting exciting. We're only at the beginning, despite three long and hard years of work behind us. Hang on tight, baby. :P
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