GNUstep PDFKit update to xpdf 3.04

After many years, I was finally able to update PDFKit, GNUstep's PDF Framework which is based on xpdf. The update to 3.03 and 3.04 required updates to the internal APIs.

This brings a lot of  improvements (and also all the security fixes) of the newer xpdf.

Important new fixes are flowing in too, compared to the last release.

CropSize instead of MediaSize is now used to determine the NSSize of the image, thus fixing a strange scale issue that affected certain PDFs (The view was allocated for the MediaSize, but the rendering was done on the CropSize).

Furthermore, several static instances of classes were removed, so that multiple PDF documents can be opened in an application, this was a long undiscovered issue!

Workspace Content Inspector and ViewPDF

To all steppers who use PDFKit, please test... and report issues, especially new ones, a release is due soon! No regression known at the moment.

DataBasin - object inspector and updates

First, the underlying DataBasinKit framework got an important update.
[DBSoap update] now supports setting fields to null. That was quite a major detail missing: you could reset to blank even string fields.
This required me to fiddle a bit to generate the fieldsToNull list. Every field passed with an empty string value is considered to null.

<update xmlns="...">
<sobject xsi:type="sf:Account">
<id>....</id>
<fieldsToNull>AccountNumber</fieldsToNull>
<fieldsToNull>OtherCity</fieldsToNull>
<Name>New Name</Name>
</sobject>
</update>

The Object Inspector, the handy tool which allows you to inspect all field values of a record and knowing immediately their developer name given the Object Salesforce Id, how got update powers!

As the Screenshot (here on MacOS) shows, changed values show in a different color (non-updatable fields show in italics and their Cell is not editable). The total number of fields to be changed is summed up in the status field. Only fields marked as changed are updated when the Update button is pressed, other are left as-is and not overwritten for safety.

Further work has been done in the Inspector and full search filtering is now available!
Just entering a a sting will filter out the relevant rows. Both the Field Name or Developer Name are matched, as well as the content! It is thus super-easy to look for all fields (also fields not at layout) which have a certain Value. All fields false? easy as in the screenshot:

DataBasin and DataBasinKit 0.9 released

After more than a year of work, finally a new release of DataBasin and its associated framework. This version features a Framework that can be used in threads and the application itself is capable of having concurrent connection classes to SalesForce.com.

On Windows

On OpenBSD

Countless bug fixes (thanks to the bug reports of my colleagues Diego, Moustapha, Matteo + Matteo).

Major new features are:

• threadable DataBasinKit framework
• concurrent, interruptible operations (e.g. select vs. update)
• handle multiple errors as a result of update
• filter new lines when writing CSVs
• countless bugfixes, especially in select-identify corner cases

DataBasinKit allows you native connection to SalesForce.com, allowing your application to integrate SOQL queries (SELECT, UPDATE similar operations), be it on Mac (Cocoa) or NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris as well as Windows (MinGW).
DataBasin itself allows you to perform standard operations in a quick and agile interface: Extract accounts on Linux without the need of Java. Use the unique select-identify feature.

I am proud that Free Software can connect from a Free Software Operating System to a proprietary system and bridge the two worlds, enabling to do administrative work without being constrained to Java on Windows (read: DataLoader). Thanks to the many developers who continue supporting me in the development and keep these fine Operating Systems and tools alive.

ProjectCenter debugger changes (now even on windows!)

Behold ProjectCenter running on Windows with the debugger module open and GDB running in it.
 

GNUstep's ProjectCenter debugger module - something which was initiated by Greg and has always been quite experimental and unfinished - was based on running GDB via a virtual terminal by using openpty(). Sadly openpty() is not very portable and also.
I restructuured the debugger module to have a separation between the view handling the visualization and a delegate which handles the actual execution of the debugger and sending commands and receiving output.
Instead of using a terminal I implemented a std-in and std-out mechanism.
While some interactive editing properties get lost when using GDB this way (e.g. ability to answer y/n questions) it is the right way to the a machine interface. For example a stacktrace doesn't get paged but printed out fully. Different data sources now get nicely colored too!

And last but not least, it runs on Windows.