Dova

Introduction

Dova is an experimental application framework written in Vala. It consists of a type system and libraries for application development.

Why Dova?

While writing applications using Vala and GObject works well, there are still some aspects of GLib/GObject that don't fit very well into a higher level programming language such as Vala. The main motivation behind Dova is to create a unified type system with perfect integration into Vala. As a type system without libraries is not very useful, we also aim to create a set of libraries for application development using the Dova type system.

Libraries

Base Library

• dova-core
  • Status: in early development, basic functionality can be tested
  • dova-base: Type system with basic types
    • bool
    • numeric: byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, float, double, decimal
    • text: char, string
    • immutable containers: List, Set, Map, Tuple

    • datetime: Date, Time, DateTime, Duration, TimeOfDay

    • Value, Object, Type, Delegate, Error, Uri, Iterator, Node
  • dova-regex: not started yet
  • dova-thread: not started yet
  • dova-task: Task

  • dova-io: Stream, MemoryStream, DataReader, DataWriter, TextReader, TextWriter

  • dova-file: File, FileStream

  • dova-net: NetworkStream, TcpEndpoint, TcpClient, TcpServer, UnixEndpoint, UnixClient

  • dova-model: Iterable, ListModel, SetModel, MapModel, QueueModel, DequeModel, ArrayList, HashSet, HashMap, PriorityQueue

  • dova-test: not started yet

Low-level Libraries

• dova-canvas
  • Scene graph library
  • Status: not started yet
  • dova-canvas
  • dova-canvas-cairo
  • dova-canvas-gl
• dova-dbus
  • Status: in very early development
  • dova-dbus: DBus, DBusConnection, DBusMessage
• dova-drawing
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-http
  • Status: in very early development

  • dova-http: HttpClient, HttpClientRequest, HttpClientResponse, HttpServer, HttpServerRequest, HttpServerResponse

• dova-imaging
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-json
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-mail
  • Status: not started yet
  • dova-imap
  • dova-mime
  • dova-pop3
  • dova-smtp
• dova-sparql
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-sql
  • Status: in very early development

  • dova-sql: SqlConnection, SqlStatement, SqlCursor

  • dova-sqlite: SqliteConnection

• dova-tls
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-windowing
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-x
  • X protocol bindings
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-xml
  • Status: not started yet

High-level Libraries

• dova-data
  • High-level Data Framework
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-messaging
  • High-level Messaging/Remoting Framework
  • Status: not started yet
• dova-ui
  • UI Application Framework
  • Status: not started yet

Todo

• Write (unit) testing framework
• Add tests for already implemented/designed parts
• Add Unicode support (character properties, normalization, collation, line breaking)
• Add mathematical/numeric functions (math.h, random number generator)
• Extend fiber-based event handling to support multi-threading (global/concurrent queue)
• Write basic fiber support in assembler (x86 / x86_64 / ARM / ...) as makecontext/swapcontext are not universally available (and mc/sc is not very fast)
• Add (internal) low-level cross-platform layer to dova-core

• Introduce any type as a supertype of Value, Object, Delegate, Pointer, Function, Struct

• Support boxing of value types
• Support module-oriented approach in Vala

  • Only generate one .c file per module => enables use of static C functions for internal methods

  • Support something like import MODULE-NAME that combines --pkg and using (allow importing it under any namespace due to possible conflicts)

  • Add vala tool that compiles and runs application at the same time (maybe using compile cache), support #!/usr/bin/vala

• Design and implement low-level libraries
• Design and implement high-level libraries

License

The Dova libraries are licensed under the LGPL 2.1+

Download

Development is happening on gitorious.

You can check out the current development snapshot of dova-core using:

 git clone git://gitorious.org/dova/dova-core.git

Requirements

• Vala 0.9.2 or later
• Linux (cross-platform support planned)

Contact

• Jürg Billeter <j at bitron dot ch>