Weekly update: Zircon

This week was mainly spent with preparing for the next major release and upgrading stuff. Nothing fancy was done this week, just hard work: code cleanup, testing, and some streamlining:

• A pretty old issue was finally closed: the TextArea was refactored and now it implements the Operational Transformation model for text editing.
• Added ComponentMetadata which holds all the necessary data for Components. This greatly simplified the way Components are created
• Fixed an error in the RadioButton which was reported by @Milo
• Added Observable which is just a pub/sub tool for event handlers
• Now you can have Positions with negative x and y coordinates. This was an unnecessary limitation as /u/coldwarrl pointed out so we removed it and added checks where negative Positions wouldn’t make sense
• Fixed Boundable because it was a code smell for a long time now. It turned out that some classes like TileGrid and TileGraphics don’t need Boundable at all, they just need a simple Size (width + height). This lead to a significant simplification in code.
• Introduced TileComposite which is the common parent of TileImage and DrawSurface. This was also a code smell which I had no proper solution for a long time, but now everything is in place
• The JaCoCo setup for coverage was also upgraded. Now it properly reports coverage data
• Since we are close to release and all the features are complete it is customary to refurbish tests. 3 bugs were luriking in the codebase (so far) which got fixed after tests were added for some cases. I was surprised to see that Zircon now almost has 1000 tests in place.
• The Builders got cleaned up and their API got streamlined.
• We’ll add Kotlin builders for Kotlin users soon next to the Java-friendly Builders we have currently.

A next major release is coming up for this Autumn, so stay tuned.