NEWS 07-04-2018 - eXpansion² Beta fast approaching, experimantal features and more

[oliverde8]

NEWS 07-04-2018 - eXpansion² Beta fast approaching

Welcome to another edition of eXpansion News.

During the last weeks, we have done another sucessfull "coding for eXpansion stream" putting in place commands to stop & restart eXpansion.

Experimental features

We are experimenting putting in place what we call `experimental features`. In eXpansion2 quality of the code, re-usability and extensible are given a very important place. This makes developments longer as we need to constantly think of how other developers might wish to improve what we do and make it simple for them. The DI approach allows us to do this relatively easily but it still requires a lot of reflection.

There is a good saying in programming :

• First make it work
• Then make it fast
• finally make it nice. (Nice code not the ui)

We did alot of the first steps with eXpansion1 already, but as we add new features we are constantly being challenged, and we constantly challenge our self. In order to react faster we decided to have bundles tagged experimental in eXpansion. These are not unit tested, and are not in any way finalized.

Once an experimental feature is created it will be challenged multiple times, and will change quite often. Once the functionality has been stabilized, and the performances are good, we will work on moving the file in main sources or be separated in a dedicated repository..

For practicality(both us and contributors) experimental sources are part of the main repository; we are hoping to see developers contribute to this part of the project. Experimental sources are not yet in the main branch but will be ready by the beta..

Lightning up the todo list

This is a news some of you might not like. We and(particularly me), are busy with other projects. As I have said a few times I am working(partially, it's complicated) during the weekends as well and it make it particularly hard for me to put down long hours in eXpansion.

And as I am the last step for a code to go from being experimantal to ready for produciton I slow down alot the progress. That is one of the reason why we introduced experimntal features as well (if I can merge any code in experimantal to core without having to touch it I would be very happy).

Back to the matter at hand, we removed Dedimania from our todo list for the Beta and added it as experimental. The "race" widgets were completely removed from the todo. So no live rankings & records widgets. These might come back as experimental feature but will surely not be ready for the Beta.

Beside that we are quite close to the beta, in 2 weekends or so we should have eXpansion's core all done. I will be concerntrating on unit tests after that. I would like the core to have a coverage a nice coverage. You can find our todo list here : https://github.com/eXpansionPluginPack/ ... ilestone/2

Docs all updated

We also spent quite sometime with the website and documentation. If you wish to develop for eXpansion don't forget to have a look at our documentation : doc.mp-expansion.com/docs.html

We are open to any help that you can provide, we are confident that expansion has a great potential and just needs some love to shine.

[oliverde8]

Some news about Dedimania, after some more consideration we added back dedimania to our todo. It's actually done as experimental.

Here is a glimps of how it looks at the moment without widgets.



You can actually see we have widgets, but very few.

Also the Players window :