[lively-kernel] [ANN} Codebase-utilities

[Keith P.Hodges]

Hi Marko,

This is a loop I have been through a few times.

In the beginning I wrote a build tool for Squeak in ruby. The reason I used ruby was a brilliant little library for accessing and processing files called "Rio".

People suggested I try again in squeak, so, no choice but to re-implement Rio in squeak, which I did. It was good fun, especially because some of Squeaks file/directory handling was so horrible. I was very pleased with Rio because it provides the most versatile files interface that squeak has. It "actually" got some users. BUT it was a fair bit of effort.

Right now I am at the stage of "Do the simplest thing that would possibly work", an XP principle, getting onto the learning curve, testing the principles.

Keith

p.s. The plan is to use unix pipes between tools to do something cool. No doubt, using Lively and Connections would be cooler.


> Hi Keith -
> 
>> I started a little project of my own, my first "product" is a utility for scanning the lively codebase (written in ruby)
>> 
> 
>> [...]
> 
>> 
>> if anyone has any other suggestions that would be useful just let me know.
> 
> Thanks for showing some much interest in Lively! It is great to see some activity going on on this list and I really agree with most of your ideas.
> 
> Now, regarding your tool:
> I know that Ruby is a very nice language to write simple and powerful scripts and I think your script is doing a great job ;-).
> However Javascript is a very nice (script) language too and as the rest of the system is written in Javascript, why not having such a valuable tool written in Javascript/Lively Kernel too?
> So my suggestion is (re)writing this tool using Javascript - if it has to be a command line script use Node.JS (which is what we use for server-side/command line scripts). But even nicer would be a part for the parts bin that does exactly this!
> Look at the parts bin category "Wiki" or "Tools", there are already some nice tools like the Commit Counter, the "What did I do" widget or the "Method Finder". Some of those are using our "file api" to access metadata or search inside/browse the source code. So what do you think?
> 
> Best,
> 
> 	- Marko