[Oberon] Blackbox open source available

[John Drake]

--- "Douglas G. Danforth" <danforth at greenwoodfarm.com>
wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> I like the Blackbox/Component Pascal interface.  The
> source code has now 
> been released.  I'd be interested in hearing
> comments about porting that 
> code to the Native Oberon environment.  That is,
> call those functions of 
> native that replace MS Windows calls and still
> retain the look and feel 
> of Blackbox while running on Native and hence extend
> the platforms on 
> which Blackbox will run.
> 
> -Doug Danforth

Hello Doug,

First off I'm glad that OMI has gone to a sensible
liscencing agreement!  It's difficult to make
money off of development tools, especially for
non "mainstream" languages.  Commercial versions
of Eiffel and Modula-3 haven't faired any better.

As for your proposal, here's a quick "cost/benifit"
analysis.  On the cost side you'll have to port
the Component Pascal compiler right?  It's
different from Oberon 2 (although closer to
Oberon 2 than the Native/Active Oberon compiler).
So there may be more work involved than just 
replacing the Windows OS calls.

On the benifit side, how much is gained by
extending BlackBox to the Native Oberon 
platform?  IOW, how many Native and BlueBottle
Oberon users are there?  I suppose one could
have the benifit of being able to use such
a set up to use Native Oberon as a platform
for developing Windows apps.  But then I
like the BlackBox development tools better
anyway.  (Big hint to anyone in a position
to do something about this.  It's about time
that the System 3 family get's a decent
post mordem debugger like BlackBox and V4).

On the flipside, BlackBox still doesn't run 
on Linux.  (And considering the "free 
downloads" currently available are only for 
Windows, the Mac version of BlackBox probably 
needs updating too.)  I would think getting
a Linux/Unix version of BlackBox working
would do far more to extend BlackBox to
other platforms.  And also there's the 
open source Garden's Point Component 
Pascal compiler to consider with its .NET
and JVM support.  Being able to develop an 
app once and then deploy it to Win32, .NET
and JVM platforms?  Sweet!  The release of
the BlackBox code is being talked about on
the GPCP group, so I suspect there's already
a pool of programmers willing to work on this.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GPCP/
http://www.citi.qut.edu.au/members/research_areas/plas/projects/cp_files/cpdownload.jsp

Regards,

John M. Drake


		
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