qZDL Status

I’m happy to report qZDL is coming along very nicely. The gui and backend bits are seperated, so that all of the ini stuff is used as calls from the GUI layer (like it should be). The gui layer stores some data inside itself, but when it gets a qt signal to write, it loads it current configuration into the ini layer. The opposite can happen, when a read signal is received, the gui layer grabs the current configuration and reads the new data and adds it to it’s current local config and updates the GUI accordingly.

Most of the information in the gui layer does not actually have it’s own local config, but for some things it just makes it easier (like the file list, it saves having to do some wacky re-ordering, and only does some of the error correction on the ini level on the write signal).

I’d also like to mention that the ini stuff is way better than the old ZDL ini stuff. I’ve completely rewritten it from scratch, and now it uses more of a database-like method. A call is made to a configuration to read in an ini, which parses it and stores it inside ZDL for querying. When we want to set a value, it will either overwrite the current value, or if necessary, create a new entry. In the end, when the writeINI() function is called, it does the entire thing backwards and outputs the file, so that extra stuff does NOT get removed. This may add a little bit more CPU and memory consumption, but for the most part it does things automatically, and manages it’s own stuff (and uses the C++ string stuff to improve stability).

On a side note, the new INI parsing stuff includes the new variable resolving code from ZDLSidekick. This allows access to environment variables, system variables (that is, ZDL system variables, such as version), and custom variables as described in the ZDL Extended Configuration. The eventual plan is to allow people to specify a path to their source ports, without having to encode that information inside the ini file (which can be shared with others).

But for now, that’s all in the backend, and is COMPLETELY transparent to the user. I’m still focusing on simplicity, stability, and robustness of the original ZDL.

Oh, and I’m really hoping to get qZDL out March 23rd, but we’ll have to see, no promises!