James Gregory

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about BooLangStudio. Let me assure you that the development is still very much underway, and we’re steadily working towards our first release.

To fill you in a bit on what’s been going on. Jeffery Olson has completely rewritten the syntax highlighting to use the more flexible Boo.Pegs lexer, which allows us to overcome some of the obstacles we were facing with the traditional Boo lexer. There were limitations to what we could do with the traditional lexer, without modifying the Boo source. This was leading us down a road we weren’t keen on, one of maintaining a fork of the Boo source that contained our specific changes. With the move to the Boo.Pegs lexer, we’re free of this scenario!

Ever get the feeling that you’ve missed out on something big? I never got to see Star Wars at the cinema. I missed out on the start of computers, the ASM, the BASIC hacking and what-not. I discovered most of my musical taste way after the bands were gone or going, so I never got to see them in show.

None of those are my fault, of course, because they were all before my time; in fact, most were at least a decade before me. That still doesn’t stop me from ocasionally getting the feeling that I missed out on something big.

One more. One that’s pertinent to our industry: Smalltalk.

Quick update on the Boo plugin I mentioned previously. Jeff Olson announced the BooLangStudio project a couple of days after I announced mine, and we’ve decided to join forces. I’ve begun merging our codebases, and we’re looking to get a release out in the not too distant future.

Our combined code-bases have now got syntax highlighting, intellisense, single file and project support. Not bad going.

We’ve now got a nice little team going as well, which is a big improvement from what was the one man band of my self. One of the contributors, Torkel Ödegaard, has written a nice overview of our progress and processes as-well.

The current system I’m working with has a setup whereby the model (data access objects) are being used by the web-services for delivery; this means that the consumers of the web-services are directly tied to our inner implementation of our data access code. On-top of that, it’s old full of bad conventions, and is in need of refactoring.

What do we want? A Boo plug-in for Visual Studio. When do we want it? Sooner, rather than later.

The initial aim of this plug-in is to provide a “good enough” experience when using Boo files within other projects. I’m not currently focussing on doing full-scale development with Boo; so the target is DSLs and Binsor. There won’t be any assemblies created, or anything else that would affect your project. The only difference between how you work now would be that you could write Boo using Visual Studio, with syntax highlighting and intellisense.

That’s for the initial version anyway.