TideSDK

Desktop App development for Mac, Windows and Linux. HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 plus the power of Python, Ruby or PHP when you need it.

History of Titanium Desktop Tags

Inheriting a project can make for some surprises. One recently for me has been reviewing the Tag history in Git. To my surprise, much of the tag history of Titanium Deskto is, well, just not available.

Up until the time Appcelerator decided to discontinue the project, there was a progression of release candidates (RC’s) publicly to 1.2.0.RC6e. That said, where are the tags? Perhaps someone from Appcelerator can fully explain. Creating a tags are a helpful legacy. I invite the maintainers to comment on this.

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$ git tag

0.6
0.7
0.8
0.8.1
0.8.4
0.8.5
1.0.0
1.1.0
1.2.0.RC1

Unit Testing Progressing With Drillbit

Our team has been working to get Drillbit running and sucessfully passing unit tests. This is in anticipation of connecting to our Continuous Integration system late this week. After a commit to our repository, TideSDK gets built on a variety of operating systems and the unit tests will be executed. This will advise the team of the status of these builds at any time and also provide downloads at the current state.

There are a total of 4619 assertions made in the tests. Currently 85 tests are failing but this is already much better that where we started originally. We continue to progress. The unit test failures are primarily in the language and process modules.

The following is a screenshot of the unit testing and current status:

June 21 Drillbit results

TideSDK Wiki Growing to Support Users and Developers

Our Wiki located at https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK/wiki continues to grow by leaps and bounds. We are receiving a lot of great information from the community and ask that you continue to share any valuable documents or media you may encounter concerning Titanium Desktop (the legacy SDK that TideSDK is growing upon). Much of this knowledge will live on through TideSDK to support our future users.

Join our mailing list to identify your find at

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/tidesdk/B7k9KyVa3yg

or just let us know by chatting with us on IRC at #tidesdk on freenode.

Frankly, we want to set an example in our project for the level of documentation and support we will deliver to users and developers alike. Truly, we believe that high levels of documentation and community support will translate into more satisfied users and contributors to the project. We have some very good technology that will continue to improve.

While folks patiently await our first release candidate, we will continue to provide Titanium Desktop from our downloads area at

https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK/downloads

When TideSDK is released, there will be no changes in the API. If you have no experience the Titanium Desktop and would like to get started on a Desktop app today, you can begin here (and transition to TideSDK as soon as we release it in the very near future).

Marshall Culpepper Session Great Success

Our Friday session with Marshall Culpepper was to say the least ‘awesome’. We are very grateful to have his support for the TideSDK project. As you may be aware, Marshall was TiDesktop’s original developer and kroll was his ‘baby’. The session was well attended and our group benefitted immensely from Marshall’s insights.

Guiding the session using an outline prepared in advance, we gained from his knowledge of the past, discussed our present challenges, and looked toward the future. The session which ran a marathon 3+ hours, documented important legacy information, offered clarity concerning details of our project’s architecture, helped with issues around our drillbit testing framework, our development approach, library upgrades, packaging, distribution and much more.

The session ended with pledges to keep in touch along with a followup as we contemplate the challenges of Apple sandbox compliance. You will find a complete transcript of the session at:

Marshall Culpepper Q & A Session

A big thank you Marshall on behalf of all involved in the TideSDK project.

Deep Dive Into TideSDK Architecture With Marshall Culpepper

Join us for a scheduled Q & A session with Marshall Culpepper, original developer of Titanium Desktop Friday June 15 at 3PM EDT / 1PM PDT on #tidesdk on freenode. We will be consulting on the architecture, potential, and priorities for TideSDK. In the interim, you can acquaint yourself with Marshall and his creation with the slideshare below. We are excited to have Marshall’s support and hope you are too.

Titanium Desktop Intro - Marshall Culpepper Slideshare

More info is available at:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&hl=en#!topic/tidesdk/R5Q93i2aZqA

Crowdsourcing Collection of Legacy Documents and Media

Since Appcelerator’s announced the discontinuation of Titanium Destkop, we have been concerned about the potential loss and disappearance of valuable media, articles and knowledge that has accumulated over time about this great product.

We need your eyes and actions to help us gather valuable media, articles, tutorials, sample apps, slide presentations (slideshares) and any other valuable knowledge that may help future users of TideSDK.

Please post your findings on our Google group at:

TiDesktop Archive

I believe anyone involved in this effort will be surprised about the wealth of information floating around that we must collect up and preserve.

Please join in our crowdsourced effort.

Progress Report 1 - June 10

This is first public post on progress. With the blessing of Boydlee, I have assumed the Project Lead position. You will find me at https://github.com/fairwinds. After some delay, TideSDK is moving forward in a positive way with the code and also with the full support of the initiative from Appcelerator through Kevin Whinnery.

I have sought commitments from Appcelerator for their support including specific legal, financial and technical assistance (when needed). I was happy this past week to have received this. I have been advised that Nina, Appcelerator’s dedicated legal support is working actively to immediately resolve the issue posed by the TiStudio (that impacted the TiDesktop and Kroll projects that we are inheriting). This has been a barrier to moving forward and a high priority request that I expect to see fulfilled shortly.

The short term plan is below. We are focusing here.

  • Verify existing builds and build instructions on supported platforms. Tool chains need to be updated. Seek additional developer support once we have verified build processes to get people started easily.
  • Establish our CI capacity and automation.
  • Rename the core project in the code retaining the Ti namespace. Ti === Titanium === TideSDK
  • Test and release a candidate at 1.2.1.RC1 that will be beginning of TideSDK line from Titanium Desktop inheritance
  • Update libraries incrementally that TideSDK relies upon (release frequently)
  • Create a branch for OSX sandboxing initiatives. (high priority)
  • Cherry pick priority bugs from JIRA and begin issue tracking process through Github which has a low barrier to use and where our project lives. JIRA will be used as resource only for historical context.

First, welcome https://github.com/nazcasistemas to the development team who has already shown himself to be a dedicated team developer. We have dedicated long hours to ensure we are able to successfully build on all platforms (MacOSX, Windows and Linux). This is an important first milestone that we achieved recently and in a relatively short period of time between us. We have documented progress on a wiki at https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK/wiki. Josh has also been with us the past days giving us further insight into the code. Josh has also recently been successful on MacOSX Lion which is another important milestone and has been exploring Embedded Chromium for the project.

At this point, we are working through Drillbit tests to establish the quality of the builds and what may need some immediate attention. Initially, we have a small developer group and we want to expand this shortly. As soon as we have verified, tested, and have documented our build instructions and laid the groundwork, we will begin soliciting more help from the community. We do not want a circumstance where help arrives and we are not prepared to get people going or fully understand our needs.

I have asked Appcelerator to transfer the TiDesktop and Kroll repos to us directly. This will retain all followers, forks, pull requests and such. I am hoping to have this happen immediately as we will be going through a process of renaming code components to rebrand. Rest assured the namespace will not change. That is Ti === Titanium === TideSDK so your projects should be unimpaired by what we are doing.

Sharry at https://github.com/molinto has pledged ongoing support on the communications and marketing side and we have in a short time identified priorities and taken stock of what we have. https://github.com/TideSDK/TideSDK/wiki/Communications-Strategy

The code base is very large and complex and requires a depth of understanding. For folks anxious to dig in the first step is a proper study of the code which is hosted at https://github.com/TideSDK. I am confident we will be able to extend our small team to meet the challenge.

In addition, we are working to determine builds on updated toolchains. There is currently a bug with scons that makes building on MSVC10 Express a problem. I am working on a bug fix to send on to the scons project when complete. Once this is fixed, we will be able to build using the current defacto compiler for Windows. That said, we already building on the older tools for Windows.

Next, we will be setting up automated build processes on a Continuous Integration (CI) system. I will be making my request to Kevin on server instances for various platforms to support the system. This is a critical need for the project as we must support 32 and 64 bit platforms and multiple operating systems. We must know what is happening at all times with the builds when there are changes to the code base.

This message is long and much more to say but out of time. Please follow our developments and we will keep appraised. Our objective is to release quickly and often. If our build processes and testing check out well and renaming exercise goes as expected, an early release should be available in the next week. Please stay tuned.

Regards, David

What’s Happening? - 10th April

Hi Everyone,

I know that many of you have been asking on the Google Transition group as to what is happening currently on the TideSDK (nee Titanium Desktop) front. Apologies for not being able to clearly state where we are at before, but I’m sure you can appreciate that there is a lot of things to take over from Appcelerator, and many decisions to be made regarding TideSDK moving forward.

Here’s the major points we are currently working on:

We’ve requested Jira Access and all the Q&A data relating to Titanium Desktop from Appcelerator. Once we have this access/data, we will start filtering all the bug list in order of priority and we will be asking you, the community, to step forward and help us fix these issues.

The current branch of Titanium Desktop is available here https://github.com/TideSDK/titanium_desktop. Please feel free to fork this repo, and make bug fixes now in preparation for when we have the Jira data. We’ll be trying to keep the process of merging your changes as seamless as possible - that means simply you fork the code, make the change in your own repo, and create a pull request for us listing the Jira Bug ID and what you did to fix it. We don’t have the manpower to bug-test every single pull request, so we’ll be relying on the community to do that thoroughly during any release cycle.

About half of the team are currently investigating how to get the WebKit upgraded (particularly on Windows) as a matter of priority. If you want to help with this, please comment on this post and I’ll get you in touch with Burak and a couple of the guys who are leading that.

The rest of us are currently looking into building a prototype of how we see TideSDK evolving into a new product in the future. Basically, after looking through many, many options, this is revolving around the use of Chromeless, coupled with NodeJS. This is going well for a prototype investigation stage and we already have a sample application (just hanging off Webian, a sample Chromeless app), that:

  • Runs the standard Chromeless CommonJS libraries
  • Runs a custom set of “Tide” CommonJS libraries
  • Runs a compiled version of node.js and executes a sample node.js script (called node.js which launches a HTTP server instance on port 8000 and returns some HTML)
  • Bundles a basic OSX package, whereby NodeJs and the application itself are executed by a bash script that I packaged up into an application file using another bash script - basically when we would build a ‘package’ or ‘msi’ for a user, we’re just running some scripts that bundle up our code, Xulrunner and a few other launch scripts together.

We will, as a leadership group, be discussing this approach over the next couple of days with the intention of setting out a series of 0.1 release goals. These will be the features that will be available in our very first release, wich is going to be a very early alpha with a limited feature set, but it will be enough to provide a prototype. I will post those 0.1 release goals publicly once we have group agreement and push the code into a new GIT repo and ask the community to start providing feedback.

Looking forward to your comments over the coming days,

Boydlee