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Re: [stellation-res] Running the Stellation Tests Question
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At 06:18 PM 2/26/2003, Philip Quitslund wrote:
Jim,
Thanks for the thoughtful response (and the fix!) I'll have time to play
with it tomorrow and let you know how I fare.
Incidentally, are you directing the VSF research?
It's a joint effort between Mark and I. Mark developed the original idea
more two years ago (see our papers on www.eclipse.org/stellation, ): the
notion of 'dynamic
program organization" and supporting "flexible ways of working with
dynamic aggregates of code fragments" (a mouthful, but very cool in practice).
The whole notion of construction Virtual Source Files from selected
fragments (and the
term VSF) is Mark's.
Somewhat concurrently (before joining Stellation), I was also working with
my former
group (the IBM Computer Music Center) on a film composing environment intended
to provide very flexible ways of working with fine-grained fragments of
music, audio,
video clips, phone logs and so on. In our system, "everything was a
bundle", and
we had bundles of bundles, composed either manually or dynamically from
queries.
Now, Mark's approach is much more rigorous, but we were philosophically very
much in tune when I joined the Stellation (then Coven) project (which is a
major reason
why I joined the project, of course). If you're curious about my earlier
work, various
papers and some historical info is available at
http://openmuse.org/noncpl/aboutcmc.html
and http://openmuse.org/aboutjim.html.
With regards to the VSF demo - that's my baby, and "HCI for developers" -
making
tools work much more effectively for software types in the trenches - is
one of
my primary research interests. At this point, I'm much more familiar with
Eclipse programming than Mark (he's been driving repository-level work and
such);
I'm planning to push the VSF tooling as far as I can over the next few months.
(Mark will probably get involved too; he certainly wants to!).
One of the principle
appeals of stellation to my project is the VSF idea. Assuming I get
stellation running ;), my work may dovetail with yours insofar as I'd like
to have a "fragment-oriented" editor (a la Sheets) for Eclipse. I saw the
demo at OOPSLA and was well, frankly, floored. Since then I've installed
the demo feature and shown it to my colleagues. I'm curious whether
you've made any progress on having VSF changes reflected in the underlying
resources?
I haven't had any time to spend on it since OOPSLA :-<
Our top priority has been working towards self-hosting again (this time
on a server that's accessible outside IBM) and getting a solid release
together. There's only two of us in the core IBM team now (Dave left
in January), and a lot of things have needed attention.
That said, I almost had the two-way change propagation working when
I had to freeze the demo for OOPSLA. The harder part will be getting
Java-specific editing features to work on fragments in the VSF editor
(e.g. syntax highlighting, code competion, quick-fix and other
features I'm very fond of). This will require deep digging into
a number of Eclipse frameworks (resource management, JFace editor,
a good part of the JDT frameworks....)
As you may know, we are also partway through a new design and
implementation of the 'ClientCore" -- core functionality to be
shared between the Stellation client for Eclipse, and a new
command-line Stellation client using Eclipse in "headless" (non-GUI)
mode (which is much trimmer than the standard Eclipse Workbench,
by the way). The new ClientCore is required in order to expose the
existing fine-grained (sub-file-level) repository support to Eclipse.
That work is also on the back burner currently; we've decided to clean
up the initial Eclipse client prototype first, for self-hosting purposes.
That's what I'm working on currently (aside from fixing Ant scripts
and the like :->).
Anyway, I'll know better when I get things up and running (but
you can give me a hint if you want...)
Again thanks for the help and thanks to all of you for the provocative
ideas.
You're welcome! We look forward to your continuing involvement
with Stellation ---
Regards,
Jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
*** http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------- Personal Email:
jim.wright@xxxxxxx
