Two big changes for the project today. I’ve changed the IDE I’m using from Netbeans to Eclipse. Then, the back-end scheme system will be changing from SISC to Kawa.

Personally, I have no gripe with Netbeans, I just have a lot more experience with Eclipse. Finally getting around to a full cross-platform deployment means that I need to know a little more about how to configure everything so that I can deploy successfully, preferably with as little hassle as possible. Since I have significantly more prior experience with Eclipse, I’ve moved over to that. As an added plus, it’s already installed on all of the machines on campus, so I can easily work from pretty much anywhere syncing via subversion.

As I mentioned back in And so it begins, my choice for back-end was between SISC and Kawa. I went with SISC as it was much easier to embed, but the more that I worked with it, the less satisfied I was that it would be even close to compatible with the Chez auto-grader that was previously developed. In order to better match Chez, I’ve moved to Kawa. Originally, I had issues with Kawa as an embedded language as it seems designed to be standalone, but after some experimentation with the system, I was able to make everything work. We’ll see how this decision plays out in the long run, but for the moment, I believe it was the correct choice.

Minor bug fixes:

• It’s now possible to open a new document after tearing off / closing the previous last document. The problem was a misunderstanding on my part in how the docking window’s tabbed panes worked.
• The open document is saved before being run. Previously it would transparently load the code without checking for changes and might miss any unsaved changes. There’s a disable-able confirmation if you actually meant to save the document or not.

The new build is available here, as always.