From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2001-12-31T14:03:29+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29806] RE:  FXRuby FreeRIDE Spike uploaded.

> From: Phlip [mailto:phlip_cpp@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2001 8:01 PM
>
> I spiked a little FreeRIDE:

This is great! I'll give it a try as soon as I get my end-of-year tax stuff
done (its the downside of having a business).

I really appreciate the energy and effort you have put into this. I have a
couple comments and questions (which could be moved to you
FoxSpikeDiscussion page
http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FoxSpikeDiscussion -- but I thought I
would start here as other's may have some input as well).

Background:
Rich Kilmer did a Spike of his own using the Scintilla editing component
(http://www.scintilla.org/) wrapped in ruby code. This seems like a very
viable approach since the Scintilla component is 1) written in C; 2)
specifically designed to be embedded; 3) Scintilla is designed for code
editing and already has the features you would expect; 4) there is a Fox
port of Scintilla (currently in beta).

My basic questions to you and others are:
- What a the relative merits of using the c-based Scintilla as FreeRIDE's
embedded editor vs. an editor written in Ruby?
- If a pure-Ruby editor was the best way to go, what about starting off with
an existing implementation?

Keep in mind that the editing component of FreeRIDE is one of many
components (obviously its a highly visible component of central importance).
We want to build FreeRIDE with a central plug-in architecture where most (if
not all) features are implemented via plug-in components. This would include
the editing component.

My next step on the FreeRIDE wiki is going to be to take the current set of
comments/ideas/features/etc. that have been contributed to the FreeRIDE wiki
(http://www.rubyide.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl) and organize them into line-item
features/tasks that we can categorize and order by priority, such that work
can begin on the most critical pieces first.

Once the core plug-in architecture is in place, the other pieces
(implemented as plug-ins) can be worked on independently. There could even
be multiple implementations of a component (like the editor), although I
wouldn't want to encourage that at the beginning because it would be better
to maximize our results by not duplicating work. But certainly, someone may
wish to propose a new feature by doing a Spike implementation as a
demonstration.

I was hoping to get this line-item feature stuff done this weekend, but now
it looks like it will be sometime early next week. At the same time I will
start a developer's mailing list for us to use internally for FreeRIDE
development.

Curt