Lead Thinking The Business of Software Development

Bowline Roadmap – Call for contributors

I’ve been fairly overwhelmed in the amount of coverage my last post on Bowline got, more than 10,000 hits and in the top 50 Delicious links for the day – it’s great to see the Ruby community’s support for building desktop applications. This post is just to put out a brief roadmap and show any potential contributers how to get involved.

Currently I’m working on getting Ruby Threads working, Bowline would be a bit useless if it locked up every time you called out to Ruby. This involves upgrading upgrading Titanium’s Ruby version to 1.9, and using a rather obscure API for blocking the threads when Titanium calls Ruby (since Ruby isn’t thread safe). You can find the ticket here – if you’ve any experience with C++ please feel free to weigh in and help. This is the one major bottleneck to Bowline development – once it’s resolved we can get on with more interesting things.

I’m also working on closing the tickets – most of them to do with Windows support. At the moment I don’t have a Windows environment, just Linux and OSX – so more testers are welcomed.

I’ll be writing more documentation, tutorials, and a website. You can also expect a “twitter client in 5 minutes” screencast.

I’ve started up a Google Group for Bowline development here. This is one of the best times to contribute since the project is fairly young and can accommodate API changes without  any issues.