Saturday, May 26, 2007

Latest Development News (and pydev release 1.3.3)

Ok, I didn't blog about 1.3.3, and now it's almost time for 1.3.4 ;-)

Anyway, I've already fixed a number of things from that release... I'm always amazed how those tiny little details can get you bugs you wouldn't think of...

This time a test-case for the debugger was needed to fix a bug. Making a test usually pays of, not only in the long run -- which is pretty clear to many -- but also in the short run, because having to start your application and manually having to reproduce some strange behaviour is too painful (and yes, the fix was a one-line fix, but usually, the time to fix things after finding the error is short -- the difficult thing is finding it, and preventing from repeating it later on).

Testing the debugger needed a bit of work... Basically the test was created through recording what was going on the socket from eclipse and then reproduced in a test as if it was a regular run... The debugger is one of those things people think it's very hard to test (actually, until you're used to testing, everything seems hard), but the result was pretty neat in the end (although it needs some refactoring before extending it for other tests).

There were some other fixes regarding the debugger too, so, if you use it, I really recommend upgrading to 1.3.4 ...(as soon as it's out)...

Also, the debugger it's now officially ultra-fast -- really, it's about a gazzilion times faster than the initial versions and almost the double from a month ago... until 1.3.2 it traced all the context in a file that had breakpoints, and 1.3.3 takes this a step further and only traces function contexts that have breakpoints -- aside from some other improvements.

No comments: