From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-27T01:35:47+09:00
Subject: Re: "Duck Typing" or "No need for abstract classes"

Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote:

>>>Interestingly, Rails seems to be evolving into a pseudo-image-like
>>>system, with class reloads and breakpoints that spawn irb sessions.
>>>Conceivably an editor could be smart enough to bind to the running
>>>environment.
>>It's an interesting area and I'd be willing to offer as much support as
>>I can to such efforts if somebody can kick this off with a decent code base.
> What code base to mean? IDE or "live codebase"'?

The IDE project.

> This is way beyond me so I'd be interested in knowing what you think
> the main components needed are, and how the functionality would be
> distributed across breakpoint, IDE, and a "live codebase" manager.

I've not thought much about this yet, but I think the separation would 
be like this:

* breakpoint: Backend for running code in the right places of a running
   application.
* live codebase manager: Find code for method objects, extract diverse
   meta data.
* IDE: frontends for displaying the results of the live codebase manager
   and for providing a GUI for manipulating the environment.