Details
-
Type:
Improvement
-
Status:
Open
-
Priority:
Minor
-
Resolution: Unresolved
-
Affects Version/s: 1.6-beta-2
-
Fix Version/s: None
-
Component/s: Groovy Console
-
Labels:None
-
Number of attachments :
Description
With a few small tweaks, I think the Groovy ConsoleApplet could be a powerful evaluation tool for many OSS (and non-OSS) Java-based (and Groovy-based) projects. Here's what I think you'd need:
1. Make it trivial to drop on a Web page (see http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GROOVY-2919)
2. Let developers add their own OSS project's JARs to the CLASSPATH (the applet tag already does this)
3. Let developers initialize the Console with an example script
So, as an OSS project owner, I can say to interested users: 'hey, here's a Web page you can go to where everything's ready to run. You just click Run and you'll see my project doing its thing. Then you can tweak the example code, interact with my API, keep running it and seeing it in action. If you like it, then you can download the distribution proper and work through the tutorial'.
I think this'd be a great 'low barrier' evaluation tool. Imagine, say, JFreeChart could have a page where there's some script which populates a chart with some data. You can run it, then go back and play with JFreeChart's API to change colours, gridlines, etc and see if you like the API. They have something similar right now (http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/jfreechart-1.0.10-demo.jnlp), but it's...
1. non-interactive
2. would have taken them a long time to put together, prohibitive for many OSS project owners
Just an idea.
So something like...
public class ConsoleApplet
extends JApplet {
...
public void start() { mConsole = new Console(); mConsole.getInputArea().setText( getParameter( "script" ) ); mConsole.run(); }
}
...may be sufficient