Report to Delphi Community, May 2005

Project JEDI   May, 2005

As Project JEDI nears the end of its first decade (We began in
November, 1997), a comparison of the current Project to its humble
beginnings shows important changes.  In the beginning, the Project's
emphasis--indeed its main reason for existence--was on the conversion
of C header files to Delphi interface units. Today Project JEDI has
become a large umbrella organization with many small and a few rather
large projects.  Its current stated mission is as follows:

     "Project JEDI is an international community of Delphi developers
with a mission to exploit our pooled efforts, experiences and
resources to make Delphi and Kylix--the greatest Windows and Linux
application development tools--even greater." 

The original Project JEDI site at http://www.delphi-jedi.org/ still
hosts a number of projects, including the DARTH Project (which has
been inactive lately) and the API library.  Most of the other projects
I will describe can be found on Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net),
where you can download files and become involved.  Speaking of getting
involved, if you've used these tools and appreciated the convenience
and cost-saving, I would suggest that there's no better way to repay
those who have made them available then by getting involved.  The most
up-to-date source of information on Project JEDI can be found at the
Borland Homepages, http://homepages.borland.com/jedi/cms/modules/news/.  

The JEDI Visual Component Library (JVCL) is probably the best known
among JEDI projects. A library of over 600 Delphi components, version
3.00 was released in March, 2005.  In addition to the components
themselves, this impressive library now includes help files, demos,
and a new set of tools released last April.  Thirty developers are
currently working to maintain and expand this library, with several of
them members of the Steering Team. Olivier Sannier (OBones) is
currently serving as Team Coordinator.

As Delphi developers we rely greatly on components; but sometimes we
need something smaller, like a function or a class, to meet a specific
programming situation.  Project JEDI has another project to meet this
need, the JEDI Code Library (JCL). This library contains a number of
thoroughly tested and fully documented utility functions and
non-visual classes that can be use in Delphi or C++ Builder projects.
Version 1.95 was released March 22, 2005.  Twenty developers are
currently working to maintain and expand this library, with two of
them members of the Steering Team. Robert Rossmair is currently
serving as Team Coordinator.

In addition to these two large projects there are a number of smaller
ones that are still growing and need additional developers to be able
to produce the same results as the JVCL and JCL. These projects
address more specialized needs such as version control, code
formatting, support for mathematical operations, and so on. One of
these is the JEDI Version Control System (JVCS) which is based on
Thomas Hensle's FreeVCS.  This project is currently in beta and has
six developers involved, led by Thomas Huber. A second smaller project
is the The Jedi Code Formatter.  This tool allows developers to
standardize all aspects of Delphi Object Pascal source code
formatting, including indentation, spacing, and capitalization to meet
company standards or personal preferences.  There are currently five
developers on the team lead by Anthony Steele.  

With 18 developers involved and led by Ralph K. Muench , JEDI Math is
one of the up and coming projects.  As the name implies, its goal is
to develop an Open Source mathematical library for Delphi and Kylix.
Currently in Alpha 1.03a release, the code supports Delphi 5, 6, 7 and
Kylix 2, 3.  Another relatively new project currently in Alpha, JEDI
Experts, seeks to develop a set of experts/wizards for the Delphi IDE.
There's been discussion about possibly merging these tools into
Gexperts (also on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gexperts). Another Alpha program, JEDI
Obiwan, aims "to provide an object oriented specification and API for
access to persistent data using Borland Delphi and related
environments/languages."  Both of these projects have just one member
each, team leaders without a team.  Consider looking into their
projects and think about getting involved if you would like to see
these worthwhile projects become realities.  Also at an early stage,
the Jedi Program Editor, with four developers on the team, seeks to
create a programer's Editor with code highlighting.

There is a one JEDI project that specifically supports cross-platform
 game development in Delphi.  JEDI-SDL provides such development not
only with Delphi, but with Kylix, Free Pascal, Gnu Pascal and TMT
Pascal. There are eight folks on that team.

One of the newer JEDI projects is JEDI.NET, intended to support
Borland's .NET versions of Delphi.  This project is headed by Marcel
Bestebroer.  One team member is currently working on some VCL classes
to make them .NET compatible in order to make portions of the JVCL
workable in VCL.NET.  But this is a difficult and challenging task. 
In these endeavors and in future WinForms components and controls the
best we may be able to accomplish is to mimic some of what's available
in JVCL.  However, these may not be API compatible.

Clearly Project JEDI has now become a mature Open Source project.  To
get a flavor of its earlier days, before it won the Spirit of Delphi
award, see Charlie Calvert's article "Project JEDI and the Delphi
Community" at
http://homepages.borland.com/ccalvert/Opinion/JediProjects.html. But
the future of Project JEDI is up to you.  If one out of every ten
developers reading this would decide to get involved there is no
telling how much the project could expand and help everyone in the
coming year.  Let's do it folks!

May the source be with you,

Alan C. Moore




 
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