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Support for Live External Editing
Last updated at 6:16 am UTC on 21 March 2007

Mentor

Brian Rice (Google Account: BrianTRice)

Project Outline


Squeak often is criticized for not making itself editable through commonly-used text editors, at least as a live system (and editing file-outs is awkward). Common Lisp has solved this problem through its SLIME Emacs mode and associated Swank protocol for introspection by external IDE's (also used for Eclipse-based editing). The Spoon project solves this between Squeak instances but is not accessible for newcomers. This project involves constructing a similar protocol for Squeak, as well as a system for a common cross-platform editor like Vim or Emacs to edit methods or comments or class definitions in buffers and then pass their contents back to Squeak in the same context. Operation should be able to be driven either entirely from Squeak or entirely from the editor.

Technical Details



Benefits to the Student


The student would become versed in introspection protocols and serialization as well as designing stateful, context-sensitive protocols. They would also learn to work with and program extensible text editors.

Benefits to the Community


Newcomers would be able to transition into Squeak using their favorite existing editor, making Squeak more approachable.