It’s a sunny Sunday here in Cambridge, UK, and GNOMErs have been arriving from far and wide for the first day of the 2015 developer experience hackfest. This is a week-long event, co-hosted with the winter docs hackfest (which Kat has promised to blog about!) in the Collabora offices.

Today was a bit of a slow start, since people were still arriving throughout the day. Regardless, there have been various discussions, with Ryan, Emmanuele and Christian discussing performance improvements in GLib, Christian and Allan plotting various different approaches to new UI in Builder, Cosimo and Carlos silently plugging away at GTK+, and Emmanuele muttering something about GProperty now and then.

Tomorrow, I hope we can flesh out some of these initial discussions a bit more and get some roadmapping down for GLib development for the next year, amongst other things. I am certain that Builder will feature heavily in discussions too, and apps and sandboxing, now that Alex has arrived.

I’ve spent a little time finishing off and releasing Walbottle, a small library and set of utilities I’ve been working on to implement JSON Schema, which is the equivalent of XML Schema or RELAX-NG, but for JSON files. It allows you to validate JSON instances against a schema, to validate schemas themselves and, unusually, to automatically generate parser unit tests from a schema. That way, you can automatically test json-glib–based JsonReader/JsonParser code, just by passing the JSON schema to Walbottle’s json-schema-generate utility.

It’s still a young project, but should be complete enough to be useful in testing JSON code. Please let me know of any bugs or missing features!

Tomorrow, I plan to dive back in to static analysis of GObject code with Tartan…