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Archive for June, 2009

5 Jun 2009

by Noel

Libraries update

We produce a lot of open source code at Untyped, all of which is available from our Subversion repository. You can check out a read-only copy of our repository at any time. If you want to work on a branch without getting commit access to our repository, you might find git-svn or Mercurial’s Subversion integration useful. If you’d like to collaborate on development (and we’re open to all kinds of collaboration, including student/academic work) it is probably simplest to drop us an email (noel or dave at untyped dot com) to arrange things. There is a lot of stuff in there, so here’s a quick summary of the most interesting things we are currently working on.

Snooze is our flagship database abstraction layer, comparable to Hibernate or ActiveRecord. Snooze 2, which is out on PLaneT now, contains a robust query language and support for whole-model validation. Development on the version 3 of the library is underway, with emphasis on caching and inter-struct relationships.

Mirrors is our library for programmatic generation of XHTML and Javascript. It allows you to build blocks of code using a syntax similar to Scheme’s quoted lists. Rendering is done at compile-time as far as possible, so you get the convenience and compositional properties of quoted lists with the speed of PHP-style mechanisms. We intend to add support for CSS in a future release.

Delirium is our web UI testing library, similar to Selenium but with the expressive power of SchemeUnit. Versions 2 and 3, both on PLaneT, have equivalent feature sets: version 2 supports PLT 4.1.3 and earlier, while version 3 supports PLT 4.1.3 and upwards.

Smoke is our UI creation library (the partner library to Mirrors, pun definitely intended). While we have deployed this in a number of production applications, the interface is subject to constant tweaking so we haven’t published it to PLaneT. You can still get hold of the code from SVN and play with it, though!

Dispatch, our controller-to-URL mapping library, has been partly subsumed as its core features have been rolled into PLT’s web-server/dispatch library. There is still room for both systems, though, as the PLT library is built with simplicity in mind, whereas Dispatch was built to simplify web development. We plan on “rebooting” the Dispatch franchise with a version that wraps web-server/dispatch with some new features.

SchemeUnit, Noel’s excellent unit testing package, is as strong as ever. A version recently got rolled into PLT core, but you can still get the PLaneT package for the latest updates from Noel. Note that SchemeUnit’s code is hosted at Schematics.

Other points of interest:

  • Unlib is still going strong, with new shorthand require/providesyntaxes that can fetch stuff directly from SVN, a more humane version of keyword-apply, and some utilities to support dotted identifiers in our other libraries.
  • Excel, as its name suggests, is a library for creating Excel files in functional drawing style. It supports all the basics: formulae, inter-cell references, number formats, fonts, borders and fills, conditional formatting, and cell validation.
  • Autoplanet is a tool for deploying applications without having to worry about changing dependencies. It creates an application-local PLaneT cache and can be configured to download and install packages from PLaneT, SVN, or the local filesystem.

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