Resuming Mars

In the 40th aniversary of the arrival of the humankinf to the moon, is valid that I talk about how my own travel is going :)

The last months I was very busy on my paid job. So, lamentably I wasn’t had the time to work for Mars. Luckly, last week I finished what was taking so much time and now I have time again to continue the effort.

So, how to continue?

Well... there was some design changes to Mars, since last release to this: release 0.1 relies in a plugin made specially to control cocoa behavior (the old MarsPlugin), which was a product of my experiments on cocoa world. There was severe drawbacks with this approach, but I was hoping it would be resolved with the day-at-day work. That was ok until I became stuck with a “unsolvable” problem: there are a number of events generated on cocoa side who would be cool to control in squeak side (for instance, windowWillClose:, who will allow Mars users validate if window can be closed or some save/validation process is needed). Looking for solutions at this problem (I experimented with building my own callback system) I knew about John McIntosh work in this area: the Alien plugin and the ObjectiveCBridge. In this last one in particular, John addresses many of my architectural problems. After a couple of weeks thinking, I took a serious decision: I will migrate Mars to the ObjectiveCBridge. This desision is very hard, because I had to re-create all the controls already built, and change some mechanisms.

But in the long way, this will lead to a better approach: ObjectiveCBridge is a very powerful package, and working side by side with John (as a tester, mainly), the bridge will be a better tool than anything I can program my self.

So, stay tuned, and news from Mars will be coming soon!