wxCPANPLUS

It seems that my project is coming along a lot faster than my project schedule says, as development has snowballed as expected! As the Google Summer of Code is almost midway completed, here is a few highlights of what i have accomplished so far:

• I believe the search functionality is 100% complete.
• The preferences window appears to be complete, insofar as it is an interface to the CPANPLUS configuration. More additions are coming that pertain to wxCPAN, which will be stored in the same config file as CPANPLUS.
• Module installation works! You can also step through the installation procedure using the ‘Actions’ tab at the bottom of the window. (The other Actions tab is a list of actions for unsupervised installs, which is not imlemented yet.)
• There is a documentation reader for perl, which is an interface to perldoc. There are two versions of this – a windowed version, and a pane which can be inserted into any wxPerl application. This is 100% complete, and is modelled after the PerlDoc panel, as supplied by the EPIC plugin for Eclipse (http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/).
• Most of the information tabs at the bottom are 100% complete.
• The toolbar is 100% complete.
• Optimized list sorting. Note: this still takes a while for some operations, as there are over 55,000 modules in CPAN!

I still have a few major items left to do, mainly a window for module authors, and documentation.

The gSoC (wxCPAN) is probably the most fun programming project I have ever worked on. I have been in contact with the author of CPANPLUS, and I never imagined I would be taken seriously as a developer by so many people! My mentor has been great help, even though I haven’t had to contact him too much so far. However, I will definitely be contacting him a lot in the last half of my project, as I will need guidance on becoming a CPAN author (I have already applied via their website), as well as other aspects of module development and deployment.

Happy coding everyone!