Is it just my faulty perception or does the momentum behind FreeRIDE
seem to have petered out? I haven’t heard about it for months.
I presented FreeRIDE as OSCON in July, but have not done much on it
since then. I have taken a break…but that is going to be rectified
soon. I’ve gotten a bit distracted with a couple of Ruby projects …
specifically implementing the Java Debug Wire Protocol in Ruby (
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyjdwp/ cvs only right now) and I
started working on an implementation of the ZeroConf Rendezvous
protocol in Ruby.
One thing that stalled me was my need for a decent lexer/parser of the
Ruby language to use to parse source in the editor. I started looking
into it, and just got a bit overwhelmed. My next thing will be to
build a project management layer into FreeRIDE (right now its more of a
file-based multipane editor).
-rich
···
On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 10:48 PM, Carl Youngblood wrote:
Is it just my faulty perception or does the momentum behind FreeRIDE
seem to have petered out? I haven’t heard about it for months.
Carl Youngblood wrote:
Is it just my faulty perception or does the momentum behind FreeRIDE
seem to have petered out? I haven’t heard about it for months.
No, the FreeRIDE project is still very much alive.
As with all open source projects, visible progress depends on the available
time that its volunteers have to give. With larger projects the slower times
are masked because some developers are in “high-activity” mode while time of
others is completely consumed by other areas of their lives.
The FreeRIDE project has generated a lot of interest, but has only three or
four active contributors (of which Rich Kilmer and Laurent Julliard have
done the bulk of the work). So, when we all hit our “slow times”
simultaneously, it might look like the momentum has petered out – but in
this case, let’s just view it as a momentary rest. 
There have been a lot of bug fixes to FreeRIDE since its last release, so it
is certainly worth getting the latest code from cvs.
Before we do our next release, I want to get the debugger working under
Windows (it works on Linux), but I’m still having trouble finding time to
work on it. You probably read Rich Kilmer’s response already – he plans to
add real project management support next. And Hal Fulton is planning to add
support for refactoring and, I believe, he is giving a talk on it at this
year’s Ruby Conference.
And, as always, if we can get more people interested in helping out with the
FreeRIDE development, the progress will be much faster!
Curt
Richard Kilmer wrote:
I’ve gotten a bit distracted with a couple of Ruby projects …
specifically implementing the Java Debug Wire Protocol in Ruby (
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyjdwp/ cvs only right now)
Interesting. What are your plans for this? Is the idea to be able to script execution of Java programs?
If this is the new location of www.rubyide.org, a redirection might be
useful (I found several links to rubyide.org, and initially thought it was
another project than FreeRIDE).
Raph
Curt Hibbs wrote:
···
Carl Youngblood wrote:
Is it just my faulty perception or does the momentum behind FreeRIDE
seem to have petered out? I haven’t heard about it for months.No, the FreeRIDE project is still very much alive.
As with all open source projects, visible progress depends on the
available time that its volunteers have to give. With larger projects the
slower times are masked because some developers are in “high-activity”
mode while time of others is completely consumed by other areas of their
lives.The FreeRIDE project has generated a lot of interest, but has only three
or four active contributors (of which Rich Kilmer and Laurent Julliard
have done the bulk of the work). So, when we all hit our “slow times”
simultaneously, it might look like the momentum has petered out – but in
this case, let’s just view it as a momentary rest.There have been a lot of bug fixes to FreeRIDE since its last release, so
it is certainly worth getting the latest code from cvs.Before we do our next release, I want to get the debugger working under
Windows (it works on Linux), but I’m still having trouble finding time to
work on it. You probably read Rich Kilmer’s response already – he plans
to add real project management support next. And Hal Fulton is planning to
add support for refactoring and, I believe, he is giving a talk on it at
this year’s Ruby Conference.And, as always, if we can get more people interested in helping out with
the
FreeRIDE development, the progress will be much faster!Curt
You will be able to script the debugging of Java programs. You can do
stuff like freeze the JVM, set breakpoints, walk variable values, set
them, resume the vm, etc…all from Ruby.
As an interesting test I froze all threads running on 60 JVMs (across
60 servers) in a multiagent system. It froze all 60 in under a second.
I then resumed all threads 10 minutes later and the system just went
along not knowing it had “lost time” so to speak.
Chad Fowler and I working on this…he is working on the higher level
API…I just implemented the low-level wire protocol. Its interesting
because I actually wrote a set of classes to be able to describe the
protocol (packets, data types, etc) then wrote a generator that uses
those metadata objects to generate the ruby implementation (complete
with rdoc!). The result is a 500 line generator (which is kinda hairy
code) that generates the low level packets which is over 5000 lines of
code.
-rich
···
On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 11:32 PM, Harry Ohlsen wrote:
Richard Kilmer wrote:
I’ve gotten a bit distracted with a couple of Ruby projects …
specifically implementing the Java Debug Wire Protocol in Ruby (
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyjdwp/ cvs only right now)Interesting. What are your plans for this? Is the idea to be able to
script execution of Java programs?
Raphael Bauduin wrote:> Sent: Monday, October 06, 2003 7:22 AM
If this is the new location of www.rubyide.org, a redirection might be
useful (I found several links to rubyide.org, and initially thought it was
another project than FreeRIDE).
That’s the old FreeRIDE site (we don’t have that domain anymore). FreeRIDE
is now hosted on RubyForge. You can find it at:
http://freeride.rubyforge.org/
Curt
Richard Kilmer wrote:
You will be able to script the debugging of Java programs. You can do
stuff like freeze the JVM, set breakpoints, walk variable values, set
them, resume the vm, etc…all from Ruby.
Sounds pretty cool. I could see this being very handy for doing stress testing and for helping to track down horrible timing bugs.
As an interesting test I froze all threads running on 60 JVMs (across 60
servers) in a multiagent system. It froze all 60 in under a second. I
then resumed all threads 10 minutes later and the system just went along
not knowing it had “lost time” so to speak.
Cute.
Chad Fowler and I working on this…he is working on the higher level
API…I just implemented the low-level wire protocol. Its interesting
because I actually wrote a set of classes to be able to describe the
protocol (packets, data types, etc) then wrote a generator that uses
those metadata objects to generate the ruby implementation (complete
with rdoc!). The result is a 500 line generator (which is kinda hairy
code) that generates the low level packets which is over 5000 lines of
code.
Another chapter for “Code Generation in Action” :-).
It also sounds like another good way to ease Java people into playing with Ruby.
I look forward to seeing the first release.
H.
Ah…it worked…I shamed him into committing 
···
On Friday, October 3, 2003, at 10:17 AM, Chad Fowler wrote:
Speaking of projects being inactive, I have some code that’s been
sitting
on my laptop and needs to be committed.