From: hipster <hipster@...4all.nl>
Date: 2000-07-20T09:59:39+02:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:04142] Re: Facilitating Ruby self-propagation with the rig-it autopolymorph application.

On Wed, 19 Jul 2000  23:05:18 -0500, Conrad Schneiker wrote:
[snip]
> What I have in mind is RIG-IT, the Ruby's Integrating GUI-based
> Innovator's Toolkit. (Although the program name is rigit, I write it
> rig-it to reflect its intended pronunciation, which in turn reflects the
> intended purpose of helping new users to rapidly rig up useful tasks to
> demonstrate the utility of Ruby to their co-workers and managers) The
> idea of rig-it is to provide an interface to let users view, run, copy,
> clone, and customize lots of useful code examples (i.e. the same sort of
> stuff that I was thinking of putting into the Ruby Cookbook FAQ, if I
> ever got around to it). Think of rig-it as an executable demo FAQ that
> is designed and commented to help you to easily customize it for your
> own purposes. This same framework could also serve as a hybrid GUI/shell
> for launching user programs/scripts. By judiciously modifying rig-it
> itself (or another copy thereof), many fairly mundane but common sorts
> of programming/scripting tasks could readily be developed, with a
> tolerable GUI for their non-programming end-user clients to use.
> 
> Any thoughts or comments?

I'm thinking about a kind of (GUI driven) repository containing (links
to) code snippets, classes, modules, documentation etc. from the
standard libraries, others and yourself. It could retrieve new
components from the RAA (protocol to be defined) and send your own
components to it; a kind of CRAN, as discussed earlier on this list.
Version control would be a requirement, enabling `cvs update' like
functionality with user specified granularity. (This would benefit from
an hierarchical setup of modules and components e.g.: ruby.lang.*,
ruby.net.*, ruby.util.thread, etc.)

Given Ruby's ability for introspection a kind of `RubyBean' assembler
comes to mind for the design/programming bit. A UML-like graphical
representation of class lattices would be really cuspy...

My DFL 0.02,
Michel