Opera Dragonfly, One (and a bit) week in

By dstorey. Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 20:11:17

Opera Dragonfly is just over a week old, and I think we can say the early signs are we had a successful launch. It was ready and launched on time, except some gremlins in the server which took a few minutes to sync the development version of the web site with the live site. We got a lot of coverage both in the media and on blogs. We made TechCrunch (and Washington Post), Wired, Digital Web and Ajaxian among others.

I've been trawling the Web for feedback, as part of our team meeting today, to discuss the Beta 1 roadmap. In general the feedback has been positive and understanding that the release was a first alpha. Much of the feedback for feature requests were already on our current roadmap, so I'm hopeful that by the time we hit final, we will have a very useful tool for Web developers. Speed has been a concern, but Opera Dragonfly isn't fully optimised yet, and improvements in Scope, which may come for Beta 1, should help. Currently JSON is not fully supported for everything in Scope, and we find that JSON is much faster currently than XML for communicating between Opera Dragonfly and Scope.

While responding to feedback in the Opera Dragonfly forums, I noticed my first (external) patch. Azamadt Smaguloff (from Kazakhstan) posted a patch on the forums to enable autocomplete in the Command Line. I've not had time to check how this works yet, but this feature is something I've noticed a few people have requested. I think it is fantastic the developers are already interested enough to add to Opera Dragonfly themselves. We don't current take in external check-ins into the official branch, but that doesn't mean we never will.

Things are currently on track for our second alpha, which should (all going well) include inline editing, infrastructure for localisation and bug fixes. Once editing works, that should make the CSS Inspector much more useful for designers.

Hello World - Introducing Opera DragonflyFirst weekly build now live

Comments

I'd like to contribute a lot for DF with code.
Unfortunately we're left with bug reporting and little more.

By xErath, # 14. May 2008, 20:36:10

So far I'm relatively pleased with dragonfly but can't wait for the next version. I have been more impressed with the preposed/alleged changes to the develpoment process however. I can't wait for everything to pan out to see where this goes. Congrats on a successful release dragonfly team.

By fearphage, # 14. May 2008, 20:37:40

xEarth: That's currently the case as Opera Dragonfly is new and the code likely isn't that stable yet. Talking form my point of view doesn't mean this is or is not Opera's point of view), I'm very open to allowing outside contributions and making a project around Opera Dragonfly. There are quite a few things to consider first, such as how to interface any infrastructure with our existing systems, and the overhead (and learning curve) in vetting external patches and contributors. For existing volunteers this would be easier as we already know them. We'd also need things like a project vision and scope, so that Opera Dragonfly stays true to its aims and doesn't just get things added as it was someone's pet thing they wanted. Personally, if they Opera Dragonfly team want to go that route and Opera management accept, and we can get the infrastructure in place I'd love to do it. That would be better than having lots of forks that were covering the same ground.

By dstorey, # 14. May 2008, 21:15:11

I doubt opera will do this(official community code contribution,etc).I might be wrong its just that this is not Opera's way of doing things.Im not complaning though,i like what comes out and im very happy with that.But as they say ,There's always a first time

By VarunM, # 15. May 2008, 10:23:49

wow, this amazing,,,

Opera Dragonfly