This status update is a little earlier than our usual end-of-month report because the team will be taking a well-earned break to spend time with family and friends over the holiday and new year period. As a result, we've got less to report than in past months; however, some significant progress and improvements have been made.
November has brought some very important improvements to BeeWare. Although these changes don't have an immediate impact for users, they're going to form a vital part of our work going forward.
How time flies! Progress in October was a little slower than in past months; preparing for and attending DjangoCon US, plus some well-earned holiday leave reduced the amount of time we had to work on new features. However, we were able to make a number of significant improvements.
Russell will be attending DjangoCon US 2022 from October 19 - October 20, 2022!
With Q3 completed, it's time to provide an update on the long term goals and priorities of the BeeWare project. As always, this roadmap should be read as a guide to what we aim to focus on over the coming quarter, rather than a hard commitment of features that will be made available on a specific deadline.
September has been a big month for the BeeWare team. There have been lots of small updates - but there's one very large, eagerly anticipated update that has taken several months to complete.
The main focus of the BeeWare team during August was binary module support on mobile platforms. Although we haven't got the final results of this work yet, we have significant progress to report for both iOS and Android. We've also had a number of other improvements land over the course of the month.
Another month of important updates to the BeeWare project! This month, our focus was on packaging improvements on Linux and Windows.
In addition the technical progress, we welcomed Malcolm Smith (@mhsmith on GitHub) to the Anaconda BeeWare team! Malcolm brings his considerable experience developing and maintaining Chaquopy, a set of tools and libraries for building Android applications that use Python. Chaquopy tackles the "Python on Android" problem from the perspective of adding Python to an existing Android Studio project rather than writing apps entirely with Python; as a result, it features much tighter integration with native Android Studio tooling. One particularly interesting feature of Chaquopy is that it supports binary dependencies on Android - a key feature that BeeWare's Android tooling currently lacks. Historically, Chaquopy was a closed source tool with licenses available for open source projects; however, as a result of joining Anaconda, Malcolm has released Chaquopy as an Open Source project!
It's been another busy month at the hive! This month, we've had a couple of high profile improvements, and some slow progress towards longer term goals. These improvements have been primarily in Briefcase and app packaging, but there have been some minor Toga improvements as well.
One of the benefits of having the support of an organization like Anaconda is that we are now in a position to make more concrete commitments on project goals, and the likely timeframe when key features will be delivered. To that end, in addition to monthly status updates, we're going to start publishing regular updates on our project roadmap so the community has a better idea what to expect over the coming months.