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FinalBuilder has a plugin architecture, and almost all actions in FinalBuilder are loaded via a plugin (we call them Action Packages, or just Packages).  Each package contains one or more related actions.  For example, the FB50PDF package contains the "PDF Merge Files", "Convert to PDF", "PDF Insert Text" and "Convert PDF" actions.  All up there is 105 packages loaded by default when FinalBuilder starts.  That's quite a lot of packages!

Now having a lot of packages does slow the startup time for FinalBuilder.  Each package takes around 0.02 of a second to load, so without any packages the IDE would start about 2 seconds quicker.  On my machine FinalBuilder 5 takes about 4 seconds to load, so half of that are the plugins loading.  It's not a drastic slowdown, but quicker is better, so the less plugins you need to load the better :)

The other disadvantage with so many packages, is that there's sooooo many actions to choose from in the IDE.  All up there's just over 600 actions.  But, I'd say that most people would only use a very small percentage of them.  For example, if you use Microsoft TeamFoundation version control, you don't need the Perforce actions, Subversion actions, AccuRev, MKS, Surround, ClearCase, TeamCoherence, etc, etc.

So, we've introduced a new wizard that runs the first time you start FinalBuilder 5 (and it's in the Tools menu).  The Configure Wizard is designed to make it easy for you to turn off packages that you'll never need.  They're still installed, and can be easily turned on if you need them later, but it's a good way to encouraging people to turn off some packages.

ConfigWizard.png

The Configure Wizard contains the following page: Version Control Systems, Compilers, Help Compilers, Installers, Licensing Tools, and Other Packages.  It also has a page which allows you to configure the default script language, the maximum number of builds to store in the log file, and the key bindings (either Microsoft Style, or Borland Style).

FinalBuilder 5 in now in beta testing. See What's New in FB5.

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Erick Sasse 17 years ago

This is very handy, thanks!



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