Daily Update 18

I haven't posted any updates lately, but I kept working on the GUI implementation as planned. The interface is quite straightforward, but a few unique features exist to help describing GIFs. One point I spent time on was creating a syntax-highlighted editor, which I used RichTextFX, a JavaFX based implementation of a flexible styled editor. Following the documentation and examples, it was easy to get decent results for JavaScript, but I might spend more time for code constructs specific to GIFScript.

Another problematic point was providing quick previews of the GIFs generated from the scripts. The current command line tool only reports the product once the whole frame rendering and compression steps are complete, a lengthy process as I mentioned earlier. I came up with a possible solution using Java runtime class loaders from my earlier work, but I'll have to work on it this week to actually get it working with multithreading.

I also worked a bit on some security features, to forbid any script run by the program from writing to files, since a normal script should only need read permissions.

I'm slightly behind my schedule since I was supposed to complete the GUI last week. But I don't think it will be problematic since the workload of the last weeks is much less.