Infra Recorder : Open source CD burning, the Beta test !

During this Summer of Code, Christian Kindall has developped an open source CD Burning application for Windows.

We are starting the Beta test program for InfraRecorder.

• Download Infra Recorder Beta 1

Download it, test it and report on the forum !

Hello everybody,
Sorry for this long period without a little update. I thought I would have taken the habit of blogging, but in fact after one week of little holidays in my family I lost this (quite new, it's true) habit....
So, enough of my (quite boring, I know) life, let's talk about my project and what did I do since the last blog update.
As you may have guessed, there was a lot of modifications in my application. I'll try to list them all there :

First of all, I've improved the use of the preferences system of the XUL engine. Adding a few preferences for the application and using a designed interface to configure some of the already implemented ones (such as Proxy configuration). This part was a little delicate because the XUL's prefpane refused to work on my application... But thanks to daim from irc://irc.mozilla.org/xulfr I've successfully added a completely working preference panel to the application.

The first thing I did is finally understand how to implement multiple XPCOM interfaces in one Javascript class.
I finally found the answer in mozillaZine : it's needed to implement the nsISupports interface wich simply says wich interfaces your class implements.... and yes, it works good ! So now, my prototype has a *beautiful* progress meter to show the advancement of the download.

At the end of the day I met one of the mentor of the WinLibre organization who works under Linux, so he tried to make my prototype work on this machine, with quite some modification after he leaves, the prototype (so will be the final application) is now fully cross-platform (at least Windows/Linux, maybe I should see with solydzajs for the Mac part). I said "fully cross-platform", but as the application only download Windows installer, on Linux they can't be run, but all the other parts works fine, that's great ! :)

Wahoo !
Today was a really sprint coding, I didn't stop for long and I've now finished my first prototype.

So, what have we got ?

• a base GUI (but fully functioning)
• all JSDoc commented classes
• a base XML structure
• a VERY BASIC download and launch application (unchanged from my "test-app")

Now that I've tested on separate "test-apps" all the functions I would like to implement in my first working prototype I think I'll now begin to code a very early prototype.

The first thing to do will be to organize my files and to create the branch on the CVS repository.

Then I'll have to begin making a "distributable" code.

One day lost on a "known bug and limitation", grrr !
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/E4X says "E4X doesn't support parsing XML declaration (<?xml version=...?>)", why didn't I noticed it ??!
Ok, I'm not the only one to blame I think... Why the hell does javascript report the "xml is a reserved identifier" when you *forget* (is the XML still valid without this declaration ?) to remove this declaration and how does it want you to know where it came from !?
It remembered the lack of error reporting of RDF, but thanks to my last re-reading of the docs, I finally find the answer, hurrah !

So, as announced, let's try to find what the different features are and which are skippable until the end of the development time, which ones are very necessary, and so on...

So there are my ideas, from the most important (what as to be implemented on the first prototype to the more optional)

So, today I can truly begin my development (I've spending the end of the last week reading documentation).
The first things I've to do is :

• list the features I'll have to implement (in progress, coming)
• test some of the different techniques I've find to do some of the more useful and necessary features

After trying for a long time using these shitty RDF templates, I've begun coding some test apps who can download a file and parse XML.

So, there we are... I can't believe I'm in. I'm sure it will be a great experience !
At first, let me describe myself a little : I'm french, finishing my studies, hoping to do research in computer science (AI maybe) in a few years.

It's my first time developping for the Open Source community but it was more by lack of time and "structure". Always wanted to do something to help the community (my only actual help is trying to convince everybody I met to use free software ^^).

So let's talk about SoC and what I'll do in it : I'll work for WinLibre, having for mentor PJ Coudert (who, by pure chance, is also a French guy too), developping a new version of the core in XUL.

Why did I send an application to this project ? Because I like the idea behind WinLibre (developping a piece of software capable of downloading, installing, maybe upgrading, open source software on closed source OS), but I thought that the actual implementation (using Inno Setup) would be a bit difficult to be as good as it could be if it were a "real" software, so I'm very implicated in the development of this new core because I want it to be the great WinLibre I hoped for ! :)