Developer console
I wrote new software today! Well, sort of.
This does not happen very often. A lot of my software work is fixing and improving existing code, and not writing new things. Maybe because I'm a bit lazy and I find it easier to fix some bugs in existing code than having to start from a blank page. It provides easier reward for me (that may not be the case for everyone, digging into an existing codebase is a learnt skill).
Anyway, so, the story is, somewhat recently (ok, actually, it's already more than a year ago), I got a new laptop. This was an opportunity to do an install of Haiku from scratch, and while doing so, I decided to go with the 64bit version. The only limitation in the 64bit version of Haiku is that it can't run 32bit software, including several applications that were compiled two decades ago for BeOS, and for which the sourcecode isn't publicly available.
I didn't think I was needing any of these applications, as, over the years, a lot of them have either been open sourced (mainly thanks to the effort of the Haiku Archives project in collecting such software and reaching out to the original authors to get the sourcecode published and/or relicensed under opensource licenses), or has been replaced by newer software or rewriten.
It turns out, one piece of software I occasionally use had not been through this yet. And so I got to work on rewriting it.
The software in question is BeDC. No, not the Direct Connect client of that name, but the rewrite of the earlier "Developer Console" (I think? it is unclear how BeDC and Developer Console are related). The idea is quite simple: this application receives text messages from other applications and logs them in a window. I discovered this software while working on PadBlocker, an input filter add-on that disables the touchpad while the keyboard is being typed on. Because of the way input server add-ons work, it is not easy to grab their output in the common way (sending it to stdout) because they run inside of input_server, which normally does not have its stdout route to anywhere.
I thought the idea was interesting and started using the app in some of my other projects, mainly in WebKit, where it was useful to collect logs from the different processes started by a single web browser instance and clearly marking where each message comes from, and in Renga, an XMPP client, as a way to log incoming and outgoing XML messages for debugging.
So, of course, on my shiny new 64bit system I did not have access to this nice tool, until now. I have rewritten my own version of it. That was made quite simple thanks to the APIs available in Haiku: the whole thing fit in about 200 lines of code. It is fully compatible with existing apps that used to target the old BeDC app, but it looks a bit nicer, thanks to the modern UI classes in Haiku. For example, when logging a BMessage, it can be shown as a nice foldable structure instead of just a bunch of lines.
I have some future plans for this, mainly to make it more useful with Renga where having some formatting of the XML would be great. But I don't know when I'll get to that. Until then, you can find the sourcecode on my Gerrit.
