Brendan,
I agree with all of your points except the need for multiple
contexts. I'd much rather see a smarter system than contexts. Using
contexts to expose a large number of classes is a large pain in the
rear, and it wouldn't get much better with multiple contexts (but the
code would be more manageable). I've messed around with RbScript to a
_great_ extent... Right before REALworld (literally, it was the night
before) I began expirimenting with a system to transparently pass
objects back and forth between Rb and the RbScript. It worked perfectly!
Basically it used my RbHacks stuff to introspect each class and
generate wrappers for each class on the fly (and smartly caching
stuff for performance). In the end, methods and properties were 100%
seamless, with the exception of arrays. Arrays are a PITA because
there's no way to get notified when things get appended - though with
a decent enough preprocessor this could be worked around. Also, you
can't create *new* objects from the script as is - you have to have a
global method to return one (which wasn't a problem for my needs). It
would be possible to get around this fairly easily however. My
thought for a solution is under additions.
FancyRbScript API (from memory -- it's currently in a 1+ GB zip file
backup):
Event ShouldAllowMethod( class as ObjectClass, method as
ObjectMethod ) as boolean
Event ShouldAllowProperty( class as ObjectClass, property as
ObjectProperty ) as boolean
Sub AddClass( class as ObjectClass )
Sub AddGlobalFunction( method as ObjectMethod )
Additions I thought about:
Sub AddGlobalProperty( property as ObjectProperty )
Sub AddConstructor( class as ObjectClass, constructor as ObjectMethod )
I've been using RbScript to a great degree in RbDocGen (to anyone
interested in this: please email me! after the announcement on the
NUG and the lack of interest I stopped working on it...) - we exposed
the whole project tree (basically) to the template scripts. Also we
used an RbScript to parse documentation tags out of the source code.
RbScript has amazing potential, but is severely limited by the lack
of language features more than bugs, in my opinion. If we could get
references to classes (not using hacks or undocumented things) they
could add similar methods to the ones I used... Even if RS just added
introspection and the ability to call methods found by introspection,
all this could be done _legally_ and not require hacks.
-- Joe Ranieri
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