- Increasing the spread of Component Pascal & BlackBox

From: Bernhard Treutwein <"Bernhard>
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:07:55 +0200

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I would like to add some more topics to the recent
disussion about what is/was hindering the spread of
BlackBox (and of course Oberon suffered from the
same problems) and what we could do to increase
acceptability of CP/BlackBox

1. Proprietary file format:

Although I really like the benifits of the odc format (active contents
forms, stamp elements, commanders etc.) the only program, which
can read it is BlackBox. Most programming languages store their
source in pure ASCII (or Unicode) and have proprietary formats
only for their "designers".

I think it should be possible to store all ontents in a XML format
and write a converter/importer/exporter to store the contents of
odc (without any loss) in XML.

2. There has been said already a lot about the BlackBox IDE
(see: http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/gpcp/IDE.aspx).
On the one hand there are (fortunately) plugins for Component
Pascal in two mainstream developing IDEs (Eclipse and Visual
Studio). On the other hand, I gave the Eclipse plugin a try, but
I could not get it running (and the VS plugin is not for the current
(and free) Visual Studio Express edition.

A complete port of BlackBox to bothe GardensPoint backends
(.NET & JVM) would provide a very portable cross-platform
implementation. It might be some work (or even more), but I think
it would be worth the effort.

BTW: with the indreasing acceptance in Russia there might be
more head which could contribute (except language problems
and - maybe - acceptance problems on both sides of the former
"iron curtain" left over from the times of cold war).

regards
   Bernhard

--- BlackBox
--- send subject HELP or UNSUBSCRIBE to blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy



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Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 19:07:55 UTC

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