Simon Wistow wrote: > Any chance of a TT3 status update? Anythign we can do to help?
Yep. A large chunk of TT3 design and development was completed between December and March, while Fotango were funding me to work on it. I spent roughly two months working on the new scanner/parser/compiler architecture, a month thrashing out the architecture of what will become a replacement for the context object, and a month working on Template Sitemap which has some particular relevance for Fotango, and also relates in a subtle but important way to how the new context will work. I also spent some time looking in depth at Mason. Mason has some very nice features that I wanted to incorporate into TT3. However, I ended up working towards a convergence of the two. I'm hoping that TT3 (or maybe TT4) will be able to support both TT and Mason templates (or something very similar), and pretty much any other template language you care to create, all within the same processing framework. Don't you think it would be great to be able to call a Mason component from a TT template, and vice-versa? Mason is not the only friend we want to play more nicely with in TT3, of course, but it's one of the most complex and feature-laden. I figure that if I can make TT3 work (for some definition of "work") with Mason, then anything else should be a walk in the park. So things were going well at the end of March when I returned to Canon Research at the end of my secondment. A great deal had been done, but there were a couple of major design issues that I was blocking on. It was a good time to back off from coding for a few weeks to take in the big picture and think about how best to resolve these issues. But that was when things got, erm, "interesting". Canon announced that they were effectively pulling their R&D funding from the UK and taking it back to Japan. The lab would be closing at the end of June and we would all be made redundant. The process dragged out over a tedious 3 months, during which nothing much happened at all (in TT or anything else). Legals constraints prevented me from discussing the matter or making a public announcement (to this list, for example) until my "release papers" were signed, and even then, I wasn't really sure what to say. Feeling rather demotivated and disheartened by the whole process I then did a rather radical thing and turned my computer off for a while. I know, it's a crazy concept, but I can be a pretty crazy guy sometimes :-) I've spent the last month or so most inhabiting the "Real World". I've been skateboarding, flying kites (and designing a new one, expected to go into production later this year), spending time with my family, and doing all those things that I haven't had time to do over the last 7 years because I was too pre-occupied with TT and other things going on at CRE. Having said that, I have been dipping in and out of TT3 design issues and figuring out what to do next. The rest of August is a write-off for me, but I'm expecting to get back into hard core TT3 development in September. First task will be to go over everything I've written and decide what works and what doesn't (there's still a good deal of experimentation going on in some parts that needs to be solidified), clean it up, get it working, check everything in, and then update the web site to reflect the current status. I reckon I've got a good few months left before the money starts running out (Canon++ for a good settlement package) and I'm not planning to take on anything else major in the short term so that I've got time to finish the bits that I need to finish in TT3 (deep core stuff). Then it should be in some kind of state to let you guys start crawling over it. More than that I can't say because I haven't figured it out yet. :-) A _______________________________________________ templates mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.template-toolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/templates
