Since ANTLR is a starting point for a lot of people learning parsing I was wondering if we should create an ANTLR virtual appliance.
For those not familiar with the term virtual appliance, it is an application such as ANTLR that is preconfigured and installed on an OS and then converted into a set of files that run on a virtual machine such as VMware, Virtual Box, etc. A virtual machine that host a virtual appliance is called a player. Most players are free downloads from the vendor. For free software such as Virtual Box no money is needed to create a virtual appliance. For for profit companies such as VMware a separate purchased application is needed to create the virtual appliance. So the using of the appliance is free, the cost to create one is dependent on the vendor. The appliance would probably be created once every several months to keep up with stable ANTLR releases. The benefits to this would be that those learning ATNLR would be using a known standard that anyone could access. If the person needed help, then the appliance with the grammar should be sufficient to reproduce the problem. Another benefit is that the appliance could be setup so the user could concentrate on learning ANTLR and not downloading, installing, configuring and hoping. I would be willing to create a rough cut of one if we could agree on a few basics such as 1. Virtual appliance player, VMware, Virtual Box or another. 2. OS. It will have to be free, so some version of Linux. This means C# would have to be on Mono or something. 3. One back end or multiples. I opt for Java only since it is free and will work on LINUX. 4. Version of ANTLR. Something recent but known to be stable. 5. Some way of validating that ATNLR has not been tampered with. Some form of CRC or hash on the files. 6. SInce this will be a several meg file, could we host it www.antlr.org, or park at some other repository. Any thoughts or input is welcome. Thanks Eric List: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/listinfo/antlr-interest Unsubscribe: http://www.antlr.org/mailman/options/antlr-interest/your-email-address -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "il-antlr-interest" group. To post to this group, send email to il-antlr-inter...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to il-antlr-interest+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/il-antlr-interest?hl=en.
