2 years ago this month, Gabor did the first Padre release.
The last 12 months has seen Padre mature from a high-end text editor to a low-end refactoring IDE. We've stolen a number of features from Ultraedit, Komodo and EPIC, and we've invented new features all of our own, making Padre a very fluid and natural place to write Perl in.
We've added support for Perl 6, Template Toolkit, remote file support, more languages, syntax checking, an interactive debugger, a regex editor, and our first half a dozen refactoring tools.
We've also greatly solidified the code. Window integration is now totally solid, we've added a resource locking API, a new filesystem API, a new search API, a new display API, rewritten the threading and background Task subsystem, heavily overhauled the Plugin Manager API and GUI, and added Advanced Preferences and the ability for advanced users to selective disable various Padre bloat/features.
The last couple of months have also seen great improvements in Padre's hackability as well. The new Task 2.0 API lets people write background logic and consume multiple cores of CPU without having to know how threading works, and the new wxFormBuilder plugin lets you build GUI code without having to know Wx (one of the biggest barriers to contributing to Padre).
On the weekend of the 24th-25th of July we would like to invite all Padre developers, users, friends and well-wishers to join us for Padre's Second Birthday Party and Hackathon in the Padre IRC channel at irc://irc.perl.org/#padre or via the Mibbit Web Client.
If you've always been curious about, or interested in hacking on, Padre we'll have a number of developers in channel to help you out.
Personally, I plan to debut the first public release of Padre::Plugin::FormBuilder, and to start ripping out all Padre's older fixed-size dialogs and replacing them with new shiny model-generated sizer-based dialogs that will work much better across all three operating systems.
If you'd like to help out in this effort, I'll be in channel most of the day on both days (Sydney timezone).
I look forward to seeing you all there.
