[Thicky-dev] Thicky - First Contact

[Rob L. <ro...@ju...>]

Hi,

I met Paul a couple of weeks ago and he suggested I take a look at 
Thicky. Well I have and it seems like it has potential.

A couple of ideas/questions popped into my head at first glance.

1) Is there an intention to couple it to a standard java servlet 
solution, passing data back via the magic of http or is an RMI/RPC/Web 
Services architecture < ooh the a word > imagined. We haven't decided or 
don't plan to impose one is a perfectly valid response.

2) From reading the groovy mailing list there seems to be two very 
different trains of thought going on there. One camp wants a scripting 
language that has good tool support for things like refactoring tools. 
The other group wants to use macros, dynamic parser extensions and 
NodeBulder like markup. To me these goals are mutually exclusive. My gut 
feel is that the first group will win out, the rigours of the JCP 
process will make a more strictly defined language the only viable 
choice. With this in mind I'd expect to see the SwingBuilder stuff go at 
some point. Is it wise to start off using it? Beyond that, and this is 
purely personal bia, I find it off-putting and confusing. Is it markup, 
is a programming language...it's neither. Or both. I think that web 
designers will view it as strange and complex and java developers will 
sneer at is as being sort of like that crappy html/javascript 
combination they loathe. To write this stuff you have to know java, 
swing, groovy and understand how SwingBuilders see the world. That's 
quite a lot to get buy in on. The target audience on day one is java 
developers, handcrafting the swing code will make it more accesible. If 
people want, and if it survives, they can use SwingBuilder. Just not 
sure it should be the first thing people come across.

3) Does it have to have the name Thicky. I find getting any sort of 
managment buy in to use technoligies with novely names 10 times harder. 
"I want to use Groovy and Thicky on this project", sound like an attempt 
to recruit Snow Whites friends. Not a phrase I want to utter. Ken 
Schwaber says he regrets the name SCRUM because it makes it much harder 
to take it seriously.

$) Where are all the tests man ....?



Rob Lally