Skypper: Day 05

Today I started working on the transformation itself. The code from python2tcl was taken and a lot of unnecessary transforms were removed since Python and Ruby syntaxes are quite close.

I found an interesting issue with destructors (Python's __del__ methods) used in original Skype4Py to release some resources. Ruby's define_finalizer does not work the desired way since the original object is not available inside the finalizer block.

Also the time devoted to the Skypper might be reduced since I start to work on an important commercial project.

Skypper: Day 04

RubyAddons grammar mix extended. Classes, methods definitions, exception, for, while, ifs are added.
Grammar is able to process Skype4Py sources without any serious issues. Several non-important ones will be solved with preprocessing of source files.
The language transformation does not seem to be very difficult - syntaxes are quite close and rather easily solved with grammar tweaks. As always the problems will be with libraries conversion.

Skypper: Day 01

I read TXL documentation to remember my language skills.
Also I skimmed some articles and presentations about DSLs, Camplp4 and compilers.

Skypper: The Intro

I'm starting the Skypper project. I'll post here short message to show the progress and discuss the issues met.

What is Skypper? Skypper is a port of Skype4Py to Ruby using automated program transformation. The idea is to approach as much as possible to 100% of automated source code transformation without manual code edit. The ideal result is to lunch the transformation on Skype4Py and get a Skypper ready to be used from Ruby.

I will try to gather statistics and notes during the process.

The planned project end date is 14th, January 2011.

Easy Agile

Original SimplyAgile application is rather well written. I've spent a little time on integrating the application into the Redmine as a plugin. Much more time was take by layout (HTML&CSS) adaptation. Styles were intersecting a bit so the base layout and structure were reconfigured.
Also I found the lack of knowledge in CSS which I'm going to decrease in the future.

Open Source Initiatives

Some time ago our company started the Open Source Initiatives project. We will contribute to existing projects and create our own. I am the old fan of Open Source software and I agreed to manage the OSI department.
Our first released projects are pdf_gen and easy_agile.
The former one is a wrapper around PDF::Writer the latter one is a Redmine plugin for Agile teams based on the original SimplyAgile application discontinued and open sourced.

Le Fantôme de l'Opéra

I've been the Opera browser user for many years. I even don't remember the first version I used. I guess it was 6.x or 7.x. I was happy with its speed, mouse gestures, wand ans other features. The only feature even 10.6x version lacks stability. More and more often I am offered to send a bug report to Opera software. Sometimes I even cannot load a site because of some network issues and only restart helps. With such an approach to quality and stability Opera will never grow its user coverage and popularity.
I never liked Mozilla based browsers for being extremely large and slow.
When Chromium first appeared I was skeptic about it. But I have changed my mind last month. It's fast and stable. There is a growing number of extensions available and I am already using a number of them. Also there is a large field for experiments I can do by myself with writing required extensions.
Well done Google, bye-bye Opera.

Publishing

Fast forward one year and the article DSL Interaction with Program Transformation in TXL is finally online.
It took about 10 months since the article draft was sent to InfoQ editors :)

Something useful again

Why don't release something more useful?