The KDevelop Team has achieved a major new release of KDevelop, a GPL-licensed, customizable, language-independent integrated development environment (IDE) with team development support. KDevelop 3.0 is a “complete re-write” of KDevelop, according to the KDevelop Team.

Major Enhancements

KDevelop now supports over 15 programming languages and numerous version control systems, debuggers, documentation formats, and build tools, according to a project spokesperson. Any editor supporting the KTextEditor interfaces — including kate, qEditor and kvim — can be used as native KDevelop editor. Build tools like automake, qmake, or ant are supported natively, meaning that KDevelop does not maintain its own object repository. Changes in the native project files will be reflected in KDevelop, and vice-versa.

The C++ support offers a class view showing all the symbols, either flat or hierarchically by namespace, and allows easy code-navigation, a project spokesperson said. A background parser updates the symbols on the fly and also shows syntax errors in the source code. The code completion deals with Qt signals and slots.

A new, open architecture facilitates customization, according to the KDevelop Team. The user interface can be switched on the fly from classic MDI mode to the modern IDEAl mode, featuring a code-centric approach with on-demand tool-views.

KDevelop features extensive support for navigating the source code. Symbols and filenames can be accessed by just typing part of the name. Recently modified files can be reached with a simple keystroke.

KDevelop offers documentation generators, code debugging, memory checking, code refactoring, bookmark management, and dozens of tools to make development easy and convenient. It is translated into more than 16 languages, ranging from English to Tamil.

KDeveloper quotes

“Support for common development tools allows [you] to develop applications for a large number of platforms including embedded platforms,” notes Alexander Dymo, project co-maintainer.

“With its new language-independent, plugin-based core, and wide support for common development tools, KDevelop is already the de-facto standard IDE on Linux/Unix desktops,” asserted Harald Fernengel, long-time project member.

“The KDevelop team did excelent work with this release. Over 40 developers contributed over a timespan of 14 months to the project. You'll notice that care was taken in the documentation and in the user interface. This version is powerful, yet easy to use,” claims Amilcar do Carmo Lucas, release co-coordinator.

Availability

KDevelop 3.0 is available now in source code from KDevelop Website. Binaries from third parties are available for all major Linux distributions. An alpha version of a native binary for Mac OS X can be found on the OpenDarwin Website. The kde-cygwin project also provides versions of KDevelop, here.

More details can be found on the project Website.

The KDevelop 3.0 release corresponds with the recent release of Qt 3.3, which adds support for the .NET Framework, 64-bit processing, and IPv6.

 
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