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Corrupted Archives for 1.0 Final

It appears that the archives for the 1.0 final release were corrupted somehow, I've re-uploaded them and verified the checksums. Everything seems to be ok now. If you were having problems before, try downloading them again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Will Riley on March 5, 2010

Lucid 1.0 final released!

After four long years, I'm happy to say that 1.0 is now released! Grab it from the downloads section. We also updated the documentation on the site to reflect what's in the git repository. We also updated the demo.

We will maintain 1.0, but we will no longer add any new features to it, so that we can focus on the 2.0 branch.

Enjoy!

Posted by Will Riley on February 27, 2010

Elaboration on Switching to Python in 2.0

Some of you have expressed disappointment regarding our decision to switch to Python for 2.0. I was going to reply in a comment, but before I knew it I was writing paragraphs, so I decided to make a separate post.

I'll start by briefing you know our situation. We have to rewrite Lucid from the ground up with two or three developers at hand. We would love to support both PHP and Python, but we don't have enough resources at the moment, so we had to pick one or the other. We didn't have too good of an experience with PHP, and Python would let us do a lot more, so we went with Python.

The reason why we went with Python was mostly because the huge assortment of modules would let us do virtually anything with ease. We could edit word documents, connect to IM protocols, etc. Doing this in PHP would require a daemon running in either PHP (which has an awful garbage collector, and would use lots of memory), or another language like Python. Since we would likely opt for the latter, why not just do the whole thing in Python, since you would need it installed anyway? We also find that Python is much easier to do object oriented code in, and is easier to debug.

That said, a PHP version isn't out of the question. During the PHP vs Python decision process, we considered writing a simple PHP backend that would at least run Lucid on a PHP host. If someone wanted to work on a PHP version, we would be more then happy to work closely with them on it. The only downside is that not all the apps would work on the PHP version, but the package installer would warn the user if this was the case.

We tried using Zend for 2.0 in the past, since Zend has some nice Dojo integration, but we felt that it wasn't flexible enough for our needs. Plus, the idea of writing an application framework on top of an application framework seems a bit over-the-top in my opinion. Despite this, Zend does have some nice modules that we could take advantage of. We actually use Zend's JSON class in 1.0, so we could do something similar in 2.0.

That said, the PHP version would need to be simple, and easy to maintain. Like I mentioned earlier, we want to focus on Python, and we don't want differences between the PHP backends and the Python backends to drag the development team down.

So, we're going with Python because it's a better choice for what we want to do. A stripped down PHP version is possible, but not for the initial 2.0 release. I completely understand why someone would like a PHP version, which is why I would be willing to support a basic PHP backend, but we can't really do this at the moment.

How does that sound? We would love to make everyone happy, but we need to make decisions like this unfortunately. If you have any suggestions, or an even better idea, feel free to drop a comment.

Posted by Will Riley on February 4, 2010

Developers are back, work on 2.0 begins!

It looks like I'm finally starting to get more free time, so I'm here to announce that we'll be back in the next few weeks. I'd also like to mention that we're working on 2.0 as well.

For us, 1.0 wasn't our best work, being the perfectionists we are. That's why we're now working on planning out 2.0. We have ideas set that we want to do, so now we're working toward actually working out the technical side of it.

The main difference between 1.0 and 2.0 will be that 2.0 will be Python based. We may come out with a PHP version of it, but it's unlikely. We mainly chose this because we want to write great software, and PHP limits what we can do, as well as slows down development time. We'll be able to do more with Python. It's unfortunate, and I know many of you will be disappointed that you won't be able to use 2.0 on a PHP host, but we have some plans for a free public server, so you'll still be able to use 2.0.

We'll probably announce more as we go. All I'll say right now is that 2.0 will take Lucid in a very different direction, hopefully for the better. We're really happy with what we've planned right now, and we can't wait to show off an implementation.

Posted by Will Riley on February 2, 2010

Where did all the developers go?

Short answer: We're taking some vacation time.

Since the two core devs are both students (Jay and I), we get busy every now and then. Right now the project is slowing down due to the fact that we're busy with school-related things. I'm even busy during the summer with school projects. For me, things should start to slow down near October, but I can't guarantee anything. I have no clue what's going on with Jay, but I still talk with him, so he's still alive.

The other thing is that we're still trying to figure out what we're going to do with 2.0. We don't really know what exactly we want to do, and how we want to do things. I think pretty soon I'm just going to start a thread on the forums, so maybe we can get some ideas flowing, maybe we can draw up some concepts. Steven had a few good ideas, and so did Jay and I, we just need to plan things out so that we know exactly how we're going to code things and what not..

Hopefully, we should be able to still finish up 1.0, and fix any bugs that we may have missed (so, updates like 1.0.1 and 1.0.2). The thing is, we didn't really test as we wrote 1.0, so it has a lot of bugs. This makes us core developers bored, and as a result, we want to do other things. In 2.0 this won't be a problem, since we're doing some strict unit testing, so we'll catch bugs earlier. At the time of writing, there's only three bugs open, so it's just a matter of someone finding the courage to fix the bugs and releasing 1.0 final. At this point though, I want to just get 1.0 out the door.

So yeah, the project has slowed down. Sorry for keeping you all waiting.

UPDATE: Jay is dead:

(01:24:00 PM) jay: I'm dead
(01:24:04 PM) jay: I'm talking to you
(01:24:09 PM) jay: from beyond
(01:24:10 PM) jay: k?

Note from Jay: Ignore our internal commentary, I'm still alive and kicking, just been busy recently. :)

Posted by Will Riley on September 5, 2009

Lucid 1.0 is just around the corner, so test!

Well, we're happy to say that we're getting ready to release 1.0 final! Today and tomorrow we'll be testing Lucid for bugs that we might have missed. The next release should be the final release, so please, test Lucid out and see if you can find any problems with it. If you do find problems, make a new post in our forums. Thanks!

Posted by Will Riley on July 26, 2009

Lucid Repositories Changed on Github

Recently we've changed our repositories on Github. You can find all the new repositories on Lucid's Github page. The main repository can be found here.

If you don't want to bother with re-checking out from the new repository, you can simply do the following in a command line:

git remote rm origin
git remote add origin git://github.com/lucid/lucid.git

If you have the themes checked out (or any other repo, for that matter) and you want to update those as well, just replace that url with the public clone url from that repo. Also, feel free to follow us on Github. Thanks!

Posted by Will Riley on July 23, 2009

Community Request for Japanese Translations

Yesterday, we got a huge surge of traffic from an article on a Japanese blog called 'Moongift'. As a result, I'm sure there's a high demand for Japanese translations of Lucid. I could do some of the simpler translations, but some of them are much longer and require someone who knows the language (I'm still learning the basics).

So, if anyone is willing to help us out with Japanese translations, we would really appreciate it. Just make a post in our forums, and we'll help you get started. Translating everything is pretty simple, you don't even need to know how to program. Thanks!

Posted by Will Riley on July 8, 2009

Developer Sprint This Weekend - Free T-Shirts For All Participants!

Since we've been dormant for the past few months, we've decided to hold a Developer Sprint this weekend, June 26-28. We'll be fixing up bugs for 1.0. By Monday, we'll have 1.0-RC2 ready to be released. We're inviting all community members to help us out by fixing bugs, and making sure everything is working flawlessly.

We will be giving out free Dojo t-shirts to anyone who provides an acceptable fix for any outstanding 1.0 bug or ticket. Below, you can see some people wearing the shirt at a local Dojo meetup. Just make sure you've filled out a CLA before friday, otherwise we can't accept your contribution. There aren't any skill or experience requirements, if you know PHP or Javascript/Dojo, then you can help us out.

We'll be setting up camp on the IRC channel, and in the forums. The information for the IRC channel can be found on the Community page. If you have any questions, or need help tackling a bug, just ask in either of those places and someone will help you out.

By Monday, we want to have RC2 finished. That way, we can release 1.0 a week later, provided we don't get any huge bug reports.

We'll be looking forward to meeting you all this weekend. I hope we have a good time, and get lots of work done!

Posted by Will Riley on June 22, 2009

Dojo Toolkit Codeswarm Visualization

We put together another video using Codeswarm, but this time we decided to make one for Dojo. I forgot to explain what the dots mean in the last post... Basically each dot represents a file, and when a username shows up, it represents a commit from that user. You can view it on Youtube (HD recommended), or just watch it below.