Thank you Igor , this was the type of answer I wanted . Ok I think I will work first on documenting the code and creating a pdf that helps the user understand how to use Athens. After I gain a very good insight through documentation of how Athens works I start contributing code. I assume for documenting code (adding doc strings to methods missing them) files out and attaching them here will do or you want me to upload to my own project in ss3 ? ________________________________ From: Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr; dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> Sent: Friday, 23 November 2012, 14:07 Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Helping with Athens development On 23 November 2012 12:11, dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
So after diving in common lisp and take a look at various alternative I decided that Pharo is the best place for me to start for my Ephestos project. The first thing that got my attention is Athens , it seems to be very close to my own goal for Ephestos. So my question is how may I help Athens involve by contributing code to it ?
Are there specific features I can work on ? The first part of my Ephestos project I call it Morpheas and its basically a GUI API based on morphic specialised on customised guis, meaning guis that do not look native . Athens seems a good library to base Morpheas on, so I am actually interested in expanding it.
In the future I would also like to port Athens to opengl , but if cairo is fast enough for me, I may avoid it and instead focus more on porting Morphic to Athens.
So my post here is to clarify the way I can contribute to Athens . I want my project Ephestos to be a contribution to the existing Pharo image and offer more GUI widgets, maybe a gui designer and some more graphic and audio tools. I think that Athens can be the base for my project so naturally I want to contribute.
Hi, Dimitris. yes, you're welcome to contribute. There's a lot of areas: Documentation The most important thing today is documentation and examples. This will open doors to users and future contributors. Without it, things will stay a bit arcane, and behind closed doors. Development: - delivery of rendered stuff to screen estate. Right now, we do it via morphic: so first you render on surface, then you blit results on Display form, and then VM blits bits again on screen. To improve frame rate, we should certainty think how to avoid copying things twice and deliver results directly on screen avoiding transferring/copying big chunks of data. - SVG importer: it works for simple SVG documents, but it is not finished and more work is needed. Some svgs are not imported correctly, we need to improve that. Of course full SVG coverage is not a goal (no animaiton nor fancy filter stuff).. But we should have a robust solution for importing vector graphics made by artists. - integration with morphic: the goal is to be able to render everything using Athens canvas. The work is already started, but there's many morphs which has own custom draw methods, and waiting to be ported for athens. Apart from it is text layout/rendering.. it is the main hurdle for us, but we're working on it, by implementing new text model, and rendering/layout engine for it. - implementing more backends. Currently there's only Cairo backend which is more or less functional. We need more. I am looking forward to implement quartz backend on mac os. Also, opengl backend would be good to have. Another thing: Amber. If someone interested, i think it will be good to port it on Amber and make Athens working in web browsers using HTML5 canvas. If you need details about any of the above, feel free to ask. -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.