Hi folks:
For any Xanadu fans out there, I just stumbled across this:
http://www.night.dircon.co.uk/abora/index.html
It is a preliminary implimentation of the Udanax-Gold specification in Dolphin Smalltalk (wonder how easy it would be to port to Squeak?).
The fascinating part is the example--you can open an Ent Inspector on an example document "tree". It's nice to see some of this theory I've been reading about in actual practice!
(sadly it is Windows-only :p, but neat nonetheless!)
Kevin Fisher kgf@golden.net writes:
For any Xanadu fans out there, I just stumbled across this:
http://www.night.dircon.co.uk/abora/index.html
It is a preliminary implimentation of the Udanax-Gold specification in Dolphin Smalltalk (wonder how easy it would be to port to Squeak?).
It's still very early days for Abora, but there is enough support for transclusions and links built from them to start to get a feel for how the core of the system works.
I'm currently working on a client/server split, and then I'm expecting to circle around to flush out the UI a little and link into a more reasonable persistence mechanism.
If I can keep the ball rolling then I intend to get the server side working on a cross platform open source smalltalk, probably Squeak, but a need for performance may widen the field. I doubt if I will translate the front-end to another smalltalk, but intend the front-end API to be language (smalltalk and below) neutral.
The source is available as Dolphin packages, which I believe are just text files. Still it is probably too early to try and do anything much with it, on the plus side there are test cases, but there are also a few 'danger' methods and gaping holes that currently limit performance and generality.
I'm not sure if there is a Udanax-Gold spec, but as much as I can understand I'm trying to put into Abora. I'm hoping to put together a technical document of my limited understanding of Udanax-Gold and how it is implemented in Abora that should prove interesting to others. There is also some work centred around the http://www.sunless-sea.net site to translate/publish other technical documentation from the original Udanax-Gold project.
The fascinating part is the example--you can open an Ent Inspector on an example document "tree". It's nice to see some of this theory I've been reading about in actual practice!
(sadly it is Windows-only :p, but neat nonetheless!)
The trees are kind of neat, though they don't provide an immediate visualization of the sharing of the tree nodes between versions of the same document. They also skip the lower ContentElement level.
There still seems to be a lot of interesting stuff in the Udanax-Gold system, both for hypertext systems but also for versioning and sharing of data stored in trees (eg BOMs). Hopefully this and other work will help to push some of the still relevant ideas out into the open a little more.
Abora is available under an X11 licence, and I mean to set up a project on sourceforge for it once it can stand on it's own legs a little better.
I welcome any suggestions, ideas, or help. It's a little way off, but I will be attending OOPLSA if anyone would like to learn more.
Once upon a time I had similar ambitions...
http://griffin.canis.uiuc.edu:8080/Xanadu
I am *really* impressed at the progress you've made from scratch- the source code I have from Xanadu remains very baffling to me.
Take care!
- les
----- Original Message ----- From: "David G Jones" david_jones@night.dircon.co.uk To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 1:46 AM Subject: Re: OT: An Udanax-Gold implimentation in Dolphin-ST
Kevin Fisher kgf@golden.net writes:
For any Xanadu fans out there, I just stumbled across this:
http://www.night.dircon.co.uk/abora/index.html
It is a preliminary implimentation of the Udanax-Gold specification in Dolphin Smalltalk (wonder how easy it would be to port to Squeak?).
It's still very early days for Abora, but there is enough support for transclusions and links built from them to start to get a feel for how the core of the system works.
[ snip ]
Abora is available under an X11 licence, and I mean to set up a project on sourceforge for it once it can stand on it's own legs a little better.
I welcome any suggestions, ideas, or help. It's a little way off, but I will be attending OOPLSA if anyone would like to learn more. -- David G Jones mailto:david_jones@night.dircon.co.uk http://www.night.dircon.co.uk PGP 0x389707D3/70D4 BBE3 9D88 B307 D8FF 5422 A61C ED70 3897 07D3
"Les Tyrrell" tyrrell@canis.uiuc.edu writes:
Once upon a time I had similar ambitions...
http://griffin.canis.uiuc.edu:8080/Xanadu
I am *really* impressed at the progress you've made from scratch- the source code I have from Xanadu remains very baffling to me.
Thanks for the link, it is the first time I have seen your work - I somehow missed it on my numerous searches through the net looking for bread crumbs.
I initially tried auto-translation to Java - spurred on by the type info, then retreated back to a similar strategy to yours of loading in tweaked versions into a current Smalltalk. I managed to get some of the tests to partially run. Unfortunately the tests aren't self checking, and seem to require diff'ing against the results of a known good run.
Just like you my efforts faltered while working with the original code; primarily due to its large size, generality, lack of documentation and mysterious naming. It's also unclear of what was left to do, and open bugs, at the time the original development ceased.
Your work seems to be a lot more organized than my importing efforts, and I'm impressed that you managed to get some of the missing classes from the XOC people.
I am dipping into the original source for my Abora app, but the best headway to understanding Udanax-Gold seems to be a paper on a simplified form of the Ent, and the first couple of chapters of the Xanadu Information Architecture docs. I think both are referenced from the Abora readme files.
Cheers
----- Original Message ----- From: "David G Jones" david_jones@night.dircon.co.uk To: squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 8:27 PM Subject: Re: OT: An Udanax-Gold implimentation in Dolphin-ST
"Les Tyrrell" tyrrell@canis.uiuc.edu writes:
Once upon a time I had similar ambitions...
http://griffin.canis.uiuc.edu:8080/Xanadu
I am *really* impressed at the progress you've made from scratch- the
source
code I have from Xanadu remains very baffling to me.
Thanks for the link, it is the first time I have seen your work - I somehow missed it on my numerous searches through the net looking for bread crumbs.
For quite a while I had problems on my wiki server that kept it from bringing this one back online, so that is not too surprising.
I initially tried auto-translation to Java - spurred on by the type info, then retreated back to a similar strategy to yours of loading in tweaked versions into a current Smalltalk. I managed to get some of the tests to partially run. Unfortunately the tests aren't self checking, and seem to require diff'ing against the results of a known good run.
Just like you my efforts faltered while working with the original code; primarily due to its large size, generality, lack of documentation and mysterious naming. It's also unclear of what was left to do, and open bugs, at the time the original development ceased.
When this project wound down for me I was coming to the conclusion that these sources did not actually represent a working system at all- instead, my best interpretation of this was that they were the sources of some sort of macro-assembler for the CXX language which provided the actual implementation. As best as I understand this, the Xanadu team had licensing concerns regarding ObjectWorks, so they chose to develop using ObjectWorks but deploy by translating to their own C-like language with object extensions. The nomenclature is rather tough to follow, but I've seen better explanations more recently about these things. Chances are you've found them, but I think I have links to those sites on my wiki.
Your work seems to be a lot more organized than my importing efforts, and I'm impressed that you managed to get some of the missing classes from the XOC people.
I am dipping into the original source for my Abora app, but the best headway to understanding Udanax-Gold seems to be a paper on a simplified form of the Ent, and the first couple of chapters of the Xanadu Information Architecture docs. I think both are referenced from the Abora readme files.
That sounds like the best strategy to me- grokking the UG sources is a pretty tough route to go, especially as I believe that these sources are not what they may at first seem to be... that is, UG was not a Smalltalk application, rather, Smalltalk was used as some sort of assesmbler for the Xanadu system. I really have a hard time believing that there is a functional system in the pure Smalltalk code.
Good luck - someday I hope to pick up on these projects again, but time has been very limited lately.
- les
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David G Jones -
Kevin Fisher -
Les Tyrrell