Check out this live coding feature of our soon-to-be-released Code Orchestra IDE
Hello people of flashkit, it has been looong time since I posted anything here. So for why not here goes a little update (turns out to be post #500). This whole summer I was living in this fine town somewhere in Adriatic:
http://i.juick.com/photos-512/1785414-2.jpg
That's a nice place to visit if you're Europe-based, although in this country (Montenegro) airlines are a bit expensive for no good reason. Any way, it is home for quite a few software development companies too. This year, for example, our town hosted IT Sea event (russian speaking front-end programmers meeting). Which brings me to show-off part of this post: I'd like to brag about new technology our company demonstrated at the event :) Because, you know, you weren't there to see it with your own eyes.
Some of you might remember this talk by Bret Victor that inspired a lot of real "let me refresh your app while you code" projects out there. All of them, as far as I know, suffer from the same problem - application state is lost as soon as you refresh it. Well, guess what? These two guys just sat down and fixed it. Long story short, check out this short live coding session recording I did and see for yourself. And think about what you could do with this tool, when it comes out in a month ;)
In case you care how exactly this works, here's what press release has to say:
Quote:
[During live coding] session all (or specified) class methods are transformed in special manner. When you work on these methods in the editor, it supplies to client app tiny swc with code changes and dispatches the event. You can also mark a method with special "[Live]" annotation to [respond to that event and] change the state of class instance.
You no longer have to wait for the project to compile and restore application state all the time. For example, you could be working on particular game level, spawn some bots and change their logic on the fly. Or, if you work with flex based form - you could log in to your server [once], bring this form up and add some fields or validators. How cool is that?
The size of your project no longer matters - recompilation will always take near-zero time. Currently it is around 200 ms, but with ASC 2.0 released we might be able to do even better than that.
As a bonus, we andle RTEs and prevent "dangerous" code from running. E.g. if you make a mistake and create infinite loop - you get log message not app crash.
So, to conclude the post with the question - what do you guys think of this? Did you have any experience with other "live coding" environments, and if yes - what were the pitfalls or problems you experienced? This is very new way to work, and so any feedback whatsoever will be appreciated.
