In the ongoing mega-thread "what is keeping you..." I realised I have
expressed some opinions of the relative worth of RB IDE Plugins that
contradict my previous support.
I should clarify this.
I am firmly in favour of the RB IDE having a plugin strategy that
allows third party tools to be added such as class browsers,
RealityCheck etc.
HOWEVER
1) in the short term, after my experiences migrating to RB2007 from
RB5.5.5, I would like to see their entire team dedicated to just
making the current RB2007r1 release utterly rock-solid stable and
hopefully faster (on OS/X). Crashes resulting in multiple hours of
precompiling plugins are a huge turn-off. I *really* don't want to
see them fiddling with the innards of the IDE to the degree required
to let third parties in, until they have it more stable. For one
thing, the blame wars with crashes will be extreme until RS can more
plausibly say "it's not us".
2) in the longer term, as an engineering exercise to help them gain
plugin expertise and as something I sincerely believe would help in
the enterprise market, I think packaging some portions of the RB
framework and compiler as an Eclipse plugin would be worthwhile. This
would also open the door for automated build systems to be building
RB apps, something which most larger-scale dev teams require. Yes, I
know about the ways to automate builds now but a team with an
existing build system and multiple language development are not going
to change just to include RB, they are more likely to discourage the
use of the language.
3) finally, with a solid IDE and some refactoring achieved, take the
above experience and design their own plugin architecture into the IDE.
regards
Andy Dent BSc MACS http://www.oofile.com.au/
OOFILE - Database, Reports, Graphs, GUI for c++ on multiple platforms
REALbasic, C++, Python, Mac and Windows development and porting
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