DMDirc developers' blog

DMDirc development

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Even though we do still actively use the client day to day it has come to the point where we feel we need to make some fairly major changes to the client in order to keep this viable. The current codebase is aging, we started development on it in 2007 and just about everything about it is now outdated, combined with us all growing as devs (some way more than others… I’m looking at you Chris) and after some internal discussions, we decided the only way forward would be to start again.

The new client will be written in Kotlin (a nice improvement on Java, but still enabling us to leverage our existing knowlege and community) and JavaFX (a big improvement on Swing, but still keeping things cross platform) and I think most controversially, we decided we would also start the parser again making use of Kotlin language features and some modern development approaches.

We did have a fairly major case of Not Invented Here syndrome and we’re trying to use best in class solutions available from third parties wherever available, in this vein, we decided to make use of install4j which nicely covers ensuring java exists, installing the client, updating the client and getting the client running, they also very generously provide free licenses to open source projects across all our previously supported platforms.

We’re busy working on an initial release, but you’re welcome to Check it out and give us some feedback on what you feel is missing and needed to make this a viable client again, hopefully we’ll post some more entries soon on how we’re developing and get a new version released in due course.

DMDirc 0.8

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

DMDirc 0.8 was released on the 27th of February.

This release mostly focused on cleaning up a lot of DMDirc’s internals. This makes the DMDirc code base a lot more maintainable, and is a significant step towards having a stable API for the client which plugins can rely on. Unfortunately this means there are not many user-visible changes this time!

New in 0.8 is a revamped error reporting back-end, which allows the developers to much more easily track and address issues in the client. This will ensure bugs are tracked down and fixed much more quickly in the future.

This release also contains a number of fixes for OS X support, and increases the minimum version of Java that we require from 6 to 7

DMDirc 0.7

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since we posted on here, but DMDirc 0.7 was released for download earlier this month on Jan 5th.

You can get it from the usual place, and if you are a Debain/Ubuntu user you can now also get it from our apt repository (details on the downloads page).

A lot of the work in this version has been tidying up (or trying to!) the code base a bit, and fixing bugs rather than adding many new features.

As we appear to have neglected to mention 0.6.7 on the blog, some of the fixes/changes since 0.6.5 include:

Debian packages now work
Fixed and improved support for Mac OS (Mac OS users no longer need to rely on nightly builds!)
More textpane rendering improvements and fixes
Ability to change (more of the) fonts used by the client in various places
Status bar now shows more than just a single message
Fix a memory leak when closing servers.
Lots of IRC protocol handling improvements
Fix out of heap space error when using the raw window
Swing EDT improvements
Build system improvements
A bunch of code improvements and optimisations
Reworked the built-in updater system

(A full list of resolved issues can be obtained from JIRA)

Since 0.6.5 we have also added:

XMPP Parser (with support for Google Talk)
/exec command plugin
NotifyMyAndroid plugin
IPv6 Support
Support for connecting to IRC servers using SRV Records
IRC “Capabilities” support in IRC Parser.

DMDirc has reached a stage were we find ourselves not really needing to tinker with it much or add many new features to it often as it pretty much “just works” for us, however we welcome feedback, suggestions and feature requests from users.

The best way to get in touch would be via our IRC Channel, #DMDirc on Quakenet, or you can comment here or mention us @DMDirc on Twitter.

We look forward to hearing from you, and we hope you enjoy DMDirc 0.7!

DMDirc 0.6.5

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

DMDirc 0.6.5 is now available for download. As usual, DMDirc 0.6.5 contains a huge raft of improvements and features from 0.6.4.

Some of the notable new features include:

Support for having more than one interface loaded - you can now have the main DMDirc client on your desktop as well as a web-based interface active
Improved encoding support - lines received from IRC servers are now stored in the correct encoding instead of being re-encoded later
Improved interface speed and reliability - we've removed support for MDI which improves the speed and reliability of the user interface
Rewritten Windows installer - we've recreated the Windows installer from scratch, providing an improved user experience and making our code base much easier to maintain in the future
New line indicator - if you scroll up in a channel window and someone speaks, we now show an indicator at the bottom of the window so you know you're missing out

And of course, many smaller features and lots of enhancements and bug fixes. During the 0.6.5 development cycle we also made the decision to switch to using Jira to track our issues and features; this provides a set of release notes showing the bug fixes and improvements that have been made in 0.6.5 since we switched.

As always, we welcome feedback to #DMDirc on Quakenet, as a comment here, or to @DMDirc on Twitter. We hope you enjoy DMDirc 0.6.5!

Intelligent channel names

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

As you can probably gather from DMDirc’s tagline, we like making DMDirc act intelligently. One of our latest set of changes revolves around intelligent handling of channel names. Say you join a channel and a friendly person advises you to try some others out for size:

<Person> Hey, you, why don't you join #channel2 (and maybe #channel3)?

DMDirc now applies the same intelligent linking algorithms we use for URLs to channel names, so we can intelligently figure out what was probably meant to be part of the channel name, and what was punctuation following it. With our new “stylechannels” option enabled, that message will show up as:

<Person> Hey, you, why don't you join #channel2 (and maybe #channel3)?

As you can see, we now correctly realise that the “)” and “?” at the end of #channel3 probably weren’t intended to be part of the channel name. And with stylechannels enabled you’ll be able to see exactly where you’re going to end up before clicking.

But we’re not done yet! What if you’re more of a keyboard aficionado than a mouse lover? You want to use the /join command, but don’t think there’s an easy way to get that channel name that was just mentioned without copying it by hand or resorting to the mouse? Think again - DMDirc now has intelligent tab completion for its /join command. This keeps an eye out for any linked channel names, and suggests any you’re not already in when you hit tab! So after our friendly user suggests two channels to us, we can type:

/join <tab>

And DMDirc will suggest #channel2 and #channel3. What’s more, if you decide you want to join multiple channels, recent upgrades to our tab completer allow the join command to offer useful suggestions if you comma-separate the channels:

/join #help,<tab>

Will offer the suggestions #help,#channel2 and #help,#channel3.

All of these features will be available in DMDirc 0.6.4, which should be out at the start of July. If you can’t wait that long, you can try a nightly build. Think of any more ways we can make DMDirc intelligent? Leave a comment, poke @DMDirc on Twitter, or you can of course join us on IRC.

DMDirc 0.6.3 released

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve just released DMDirc 0.6.3, which is our first release in 2010. From a development point of view, this release also marks the end of our support for Subversion. An overview of the changes included follows:

Window menu enhancement

The window menu now groups windows by server, making it much easier to quickly access a specific window (especially if you’re connected to lots of different servers!).

Addon browser

The addon browser was previously available in 0.6.3m2, but was not properly functioning in that release. DMDirc 0.6.3 presents a functioning addon browser, allowing you to browse through plugins, themes and action packs from within DMDirc, and download and install them with one click.

Backgrounds

You can now specify background images for both the textpane and the main ‘desktop’ area.

Topic improvements

A brand new topic bar now adorns the top of channel windows, allowing you to easily see the current topic at a glance, and edit it right from the channel. The topic history display in the channel settings window has also been completely revamped, showing much more detail than it did previously.

Improved URL and channel linking

DMDirc’s already intelligent URL handling has been improved further, now allowing some extra characters to ensure compatibility with non-standard URLs. We’ve also applied the same techniques we use for intelligent URL linking to channel name links, so trailing punctuation and brackets will no longer get in your way when trying to join a channel.

DCC fixes

We’ve fixed a whole raft of bugs in the DCC plugin, which should make it work much more reliably in more circumstances than ever before. We’ve also fixed a particularly silly bug which rate limited all DCCs to 10KB/s in past versions.

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We will also respond to mentions on twitter. DMDirc 0.6.3 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other java-capable platforms that are not specifically supported.

Releasing for lazy people

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In preparation for DMDirc 0.6.3, we’ve just finished enhancing our release procedures considerably. Previously, a typical set of steps needed to release a version of DMDirc would be:

Create a new tag in a local Git repository
Push the new tag
Run the relevant ant task to create an installer
Upload the installers and jar file to the correct place
Go through each plugin and upload each one (one at a time) to the addons site
Find or clone a copy of the main website repository
Update a PHP file to contain details of each supported OS and each download and its size, etc
Commit the website changes
Push the website changes

Obviously, this process was distinctly not enjoyable. A lot of it now lends itself quite well to being automated, but we hadn’t tried this in the past for various reasons (such as our use of SVN prior to Git, and the huge length of time between releases prior to the introduction of our fixed-length release cycle). Now we have the tools and the motivation (we don’t want to be doing that process every four months for each alpha, beta, release candidate and stable version!), we set about automating the entire procedure.

We already had a set of scripts which monitored our Git repositories for new commits, and did various useful things such as announcing the commits to IRC and updating our bug tracker. Some extra code was introduced for commits to the client repository that checks if the commit looks like a release, determines which updater channel it’s for (alpha, beta and rcs are unstable, plain versions are stable), and then builds the relevant installers. Once the installer’s built, it copies or uploads the files as appropriate, automatically updates the website as needed and commits and pushes the changes, and then automatically submits every plugin to the addons site. This means our release process is now:

Create a new tag in a local Git repository
Push the new tag

Which I’m sure you’ll agree is decidedly simpler. Of course, we still have to announce the release to the world. Anyone wanting to develop an artificial intelligence to automatically create changelogs, release notes, blog posts, news stories and tweets for each release should get in touch!

SVN Deprecation

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Despite using Git for all of our DMDirc development work for over a year, we have continued to maintain a copy of the entire codebase in an SVN repository. This was primarily to facilitate some of our automated scripts, which we’ve finally finished migrating to use Git. This means that we no longer have any need to keep the SVN Repository up to date, and will stop doing so after the release of 0.6.3 in early March.

Anyone who is still using an SVN checkout should read http://www.dmdirc.com/git and switch to using Git, which brings numerous advantages and makes contributing back to DMDirc easier thanks to Gerrit.

If you have any questions about DMDirc development, feel free to join us in #DMDirc on Quakenet.

Introducing Gerrit

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For the past year, the ever-growing DMDirc code base has been managed using the Git version control system. We still mirror our code to an SVN repository, and a couple of our automated tools still use the SVN version of things, but we’re slowly and surely modifying, upgrading or scrapping these in favour of Git-based solutions.

Recently we began a trial of using Gerrit to manage commits made to the main DMDirc repositories for the client and the parser. Gerrit is a code review tool, which developers submit their changes to (instead of pushing them directly to the Git repositories); other developers can then review the changes, test them, and leave feedback, before ultimately approving or rejecting the change. Only once a change has been approved is it allowed to go into the repository.

This has helped us greatly improve the quality of the code that makes it into the client. Another advantage to using Gerrit is that it now allows us to open up the repositories a bit more and allow third-party contributions with much more ease than before: it is now possible for anybody to sign up to Gerrit and begin committing to DMDirc right away! We even have a guide on our Git wiki page detailing how to do just that.

If you would like to contribute to DMDirc, either by committing (via Gerrit!) or in other ways, we suggest paying a visit to #DMDirc on either Quakenet, Freenode, OTFC, Coldfront or Chatspike! (Don’t worry: we have a system in place to link all the channels together!)

DMDirc 0.6.3m2 Released

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

At the start of the month we quietly released DMDirc 0.6.3m2 as part of our new fixed release cycle.

DMDirc 0.6.3m2 is the second milestone release since 0.6.1, and the first release we’ve made as part of the fixed cycle. It contains a large number of bug fixes and minor improvements.

As this is the first release as part of the fixed release cycle, we weren’t used to the limited timescale between releases and as such our usual ‘quiet’ period between releases had a much larger effect than it does normally. This means that we didn’t get as many features into this release as we would have liked, but we still managed to squeeze a few in:

Textpane font settings

One of our most requested improvements - you can now set both the font name and size of the text displayed in DMDirc’s textpane. The options can be set globally, per-server or per-channel as usual.

Alternate parsers (Twitter support)

DMDirc can now support different parsers in addition to our previous IRC parser. This means better or alternative IRC parsers can be developed in the future, or we can develop parsers to interact with completely different systems. As a proof of concept, we’ve developed a Twitter parser which allows you to read your Twitter news feed and post status updates direct from DMDirc!

Configurable server names

You can now configure how DMDirc displays server names in the treeview and the titlebar. This means you can (for example) show your nickname along with the server name (useful if you often connect to the same server twice as different users), or show the network name instead of the server address (in case you use a bouncer to connect to multiple networks).

License panel

We’ve also tidied up the ‘License’ panel in the about dialog, to make it much clearer which components are covered by which license. This should make it easier for anyone interested in modifying DMDirc or reusing parts of it to see where they stand.

As we’re now committed to releasing on a fixed schedule this will be the last ‘milestone’ release, and for future releases we’ll just add to the minor version number until we’ve implemented the features targeted for the next major release. This means the next release will be 0.6.3, and any further releases before the 0.7 feature set is complete will be 0.6.4, 0.6.5, etc

As always, we welcome bug reports and feature requests on our issue tracker, irc channel or as comments on this post. We will also respond to mentions on twitter. DMDirc 0.6.3m2 continues to be supported on Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X and Windows, as well as having a standalone Jar file for any other java-capable platforms that are not specifically supported.