This is the week 08 status report for Durham Metadata Framework for Eclipse, AudioMan and their subprojects.

What was done last week

Whenever a file is added or removed from Durham it can notify classes I've called caches. Some of these caches, like the Hibernate/hsqldb cache I wrote last week, can be persistent and reloaded at startup time. Other caches, like the models of the MVC pattern used for the user interface, can be temporary and do not need to persist their data.

The whole discussion about the Operation class last week is kind of embarassing. I realised later that I unknowingly made it look very similar to Eclipse's Job class. D'oh! I changed all of the Operation subclasses to Job subclasses and now they show progress in the UI. It was a pretty easy refactor. <g>

The AudioMan UI is starting to settle down. I purposely did not tweak it early -- I consider early UI tweaking just as bad as early performance tweaking. Not only is it bad it's often a waste of time. When you're refactoring and moving things around sometimes the UI feels it the most. I'll get close to the target during development to get feedback but the UI will be tweaked as late as possible. You don't put icing on a cake before it has baked and cooled, right?

I also worked on some Ogg Vorbis support this week. It's in the early stages. On the development mailing list I invited other people to write metadata plugins, especially for audio formats (WMA,RA,FLAC,SHN,etc) for AudioMan. If you are interested in doing that let me know and I'll set you up.

Another interesting metadata plugin for Durham that one of you could make: Java source files (*.java). You could pick out metadata like number of classes, methods, member variables, lines of code, etc. If you use some of the Eclipse JDT plugins this may not be too difficult. You may also want to make a source code content category.

New things to do

• Use the new build machine for CVS and nightly builds -- pending: there could be news here
• Mac: package products in a dmg'd bundle
• Support for adding backup discs to the collection
• Start work on the Backup Management Perspective