[Smee-development] Thoughts on example for host integration

[David P. <dpe...@qu...>]

>> The more I've been thinking about your Smee, the more I've been 
>> coming to the conclusion that this is the exact thing required to 
>> break a Smalltalk application environment out of the Smalltalk 
>> community. I could package up with:Style and market it to 
>> non-Smalltalkers as a Javascript development environment, with DOM 
>> inspectors, obviously an XML renderer and one day may be a debugger 
>> of sorts.

DP> I knew it seemed like a good idea when I started, but the more I 
DP> think about it, the more convinced I am.  I finished that internal 
DP> paper and ended up building examples of old language to new language 
DP> for all 7(gulp) of our little languages and they all looked more 
DP> intuitive to the average Joe (at least that is early feedback - first
formal review on Thursday).
 
>> It gives the curly brace crowd something to 'hold on to' when trying 
>> out the software. You may have struck a real chord here David. Is the 
>> idea to have HostObjectWrapper so that the Javascript can manipulate 
>> any object in the system if it can get a hold of it? If so, then JS 
>> is a valid alternative to St in an St VM.

DP> I think that HostObjectWrapper can be implemented as described (I 
DP> believe the Rhino guys did the same thing for Java).  This is going 
DP> to be appropriate for an audience that you want to give that kind of 
DP> power.  I also want to support a wrapper style that lets you have 
DP> fine-grained control over the permeability between ST and JS.  You 
DP> might want that control because of security concerns or because of 
DP> support concerns - you just might not want users to have access to ALL
objects in your image.

DP> I'm going to need to put together an example of integrating Smee 
DP> with a host application.  I'm thinking that with:Style: would make a 
DP> nice example.  What do you think?

DP> Other semi-random thoughts:
DP> - A JS XPath object would make a nice companion to the native RegExp
object.
DP> - JS in XSLT might be interesting - in both modes