Hi again! Okay, in recent times with the quiet that has fallen over the project I have taken to working on the guts of FreeCard in my spare time. In this case the guts means anything that isn't FreeGUI. I have discovered that our source code is scattered all around the place in the hands of a large number of people and this is a shame. As such, all the work I'm doing has now been checked into the CVS repository at Sourceforge. You can browse it from http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=4139 and there are also instructions on how to check out a copy.
I've also started to use the tracking features of Sourceforge so to log feature requests you can go to: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=4139 and you don't even have to have a sourceforge account. There's plenty more stuff to play with at sourceforge and all of it can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/freecard/ Ah, so much administration..... Anyway, I've spent some time planning out the best way to approach FreeCard and get it up and running as rapidly as possible while still producing a great product. It became quite apparent that I didn't have the experience to create cross platform applications particularly well in C++, so I started looking for other options. It occurs to me that essentially FreeCard requires a cross platform runtime and a compiler (the compiler must of course be able to run in the runtime so that it's cross platform). The compiler I have plenty of knowledge to write and it is mostly a case of brute force to cover all the constructs available in HyperCard. The runtime I had issues with. It occurs to me however that there are runtimes out there already that provide all the functionality of HyperCard and more - we just need to map HyperCard on to them. I am of course thinking about the Java runtime. Now, writing a HyperTalk interpreter in FreeCard has been discussed before and it was decided it would be too slow which is true. However, there is no reason that HyperCard can't be compiled down to Java byte code and run just like any other Java code, we just need a mapping from HyperCard objects to Java. So, tonight I have imported a new project into CVS called jcard. It already provides a basic mapping of HyperCard objects to FreeCard objects and is enough to satisfy me that this is all possible. The runtime is far from complete and there has been no work done so far on the compiler so there is a long way to go yet, but this is the reason I've been so excited about FreeCard lately. Anyway, you can use any java compiler to build the project as it's very simple, however I have included an ant build script so I would recommend grabbing a copy of ant from http://jakarta.apache.org/ant and just using that. I'll be adding complete build documentation to the documentation manager over the next few days though it really is very straight forward. So, I'd love to hear some feedback on this rather major change of direction and whether people can help out with it, in what way etc. We haven't paid much attention to who knew Java here before. Anyway, another email coming with some more tasks that people may be able to help out with. The reason for the separate emails is so that they can branch off different discussions and have appropriate subject lines. Adrian Sutton ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: OSDN - Tired of that same old cell phone? Get a new here for FREE! https://www.inphonic.com/r.asp?r=sourceforge1&refcode1=vs3390 _______________________________________________ Freecard-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freecard-general
