Re: Turbo: A great idea, not properly thought through... ?

In article <44eb9711$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, says...

What I haven't heard is what set of limitations you *would*
be happy with.

Knowing that you've thought this all through, I'm looking
forward to hearing your ideas.

Ignoring what I suspect is a bit of sarcasm... ;)

As regards what I think Turbo should be, if it weren't already settled
as being what it is....


Turbo Explorer:

An IDE with pluggable language personalities/modules call them what you
will. So you can install Turbo Explorer with whatever language
personalities you desire - all 4 if you want, plus any others that might
come along in the future (!!)

As for limitations. Well component installation is not appropriate
imho. You should be able to install components, packages, IDE
extensions.

Why? Because this is an utterly artifical restriction - without any
restriction on instantiating 3rd party components at runtime it's not a
restriction or limitation at all, just an annoyance.

In some development environments I have worked in it wouldn't even be
that, since I have seen examples where palette installation of non-
standard components is verboten in order to ensure that a project can be
fully worked on in a vanilla IDE install.

(and given that if you want to fiddle around with different Exploreres
or even have a full Turbo and play with other Explorers you may be
uninstalling and installing IDES on a fairly regular basis, it would
make sense to not have too much customisation in your IDE to have to
restore evey time anyway, including not installing loads of components)


So what *should* be excluded?

Well, some of the Pro features, obviously. Refactoring I would have
though would be an obvious candidate - perhaps not entirely excluded in
this case - provide some basic refactorings as a technology
demonstrator, with the full suite available only in Pro.

Debugging capabilities could be reigned in - no "attach to process"
support for example.

Modelling (Together) capabilities are another obvious candidate for
exclusion from a non-pro SKU.

Scriptable templates - provide templates in the box to show what can be
done, but creating your own requires Pro.

History Manager/differencing/multi-level Local File backups - all Pro
features. Ditto Quality Central integration.

Unit testing framework.

BizSnap



Frankly, all the things that are obviously not of immediate use or
interest to someone getting to grips with a Turbo language for the first
time on small projects.

I think the reason this isn't how Turbo Explorer is actually structured
as of now is due to the rush to "get it out".

Actually implementing restrictions requires work to be done on the
product itself. Inhibiting component installation is conceivably a
trivial change to make in the IDE code and removing personalities
primarily a change in the installer - the rest is packaging: slap a new
label on the box and rush out a web site.

Honestly, does anyone here truly consider the turboexplorer web site to
be a great shopfront for the Turbo range?

I don't mean to disparage the effort that went into producing it, but it
looks and feels incomplete and rushed.

Just mho, of course.



--
Jolyon Smith
.

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