#828 Fan projects/library in dev / missing ...

lbertrand Thu 19 Nov 2009

Hi everyone...

I was following Fan, now Fantom for a while without having join the forum... But I now decided to go a step further and be part of the Fantom community.

I think Fantom is one of the most promising language out there running on the JVM and on top of that also running on .Net and on the browser through javascript compilation... And the pragmatic approach taken so far by Brian and Franck make me think the langugage will not be a dumpster of all the "cool" ideas out there, like, I have the feeling Scala is becoming!

Clojure, pure functional languages I have the feeling was a step to far for me, as a server side java programmers in my everyday work life...

So really Fanton is really the most exciting new langugage I want to play with at the moment...

I decided to advocate it around me, at my work, even if I think it is not ready for real business development for the moment - need to be sure it will not change every release ;-) But, for greenfield projects, or internal tools, I think this can be a good choice.

Anyway, back to the main topic. It will be great to have a page on the site displaying all the projects/ libraries/ ... that pepole are working on at the moment using the fantom language.

The other part of it, is I would like to know waht kind of libraries are missing at the moment that the community think should be added to the Fantom world... Like a mock/spy/stub library, a BDD framework, ...

I would like to play more deeply with Fantom but would like to do in a useful way - so I am looking for ideas on what I can tackle...

Thanks to everyone.. Keep up the good work.

brian Thu 19 Nov 2009

welcome lbertrand!

Funny you should mention putting together a list of Fantom projects - that was exactly what I proposed last night in #826 - so I'll be posting that to hg and it will be in the next build.

Fantom is definitely not locked down for an official 1.0 release, but I think we are getting close. I have one more big potential breaking change I'm pondering regarding facets/symbols (I am not pleased with the design we came up with this summer). Once I get my ideas straight I will post.

I know some developers are doing things with OSGi, Glassfish, IDEs. But there is an infinite number of things Fantom could really use! I would suggest if you have a project in mind, just post to the forum and see if anyone is already working on that.

tactics Thu 19 Nov 2009

Brian, what are the issues with symbols and facets?

brian Thu 19 Nov 2009

Brian, what are the issues with symbols and facets?

I don't think I'm really ready to get into it yet, but I'm thinking symbols just don't fit into the overall OO namespace cleanly. I think we should go back to undefined facets or move more towards Java/C# using normal classes. I want to investigate Java FFI more and how we integrate annotations.

lbertrand Wed 25 Nov 2009

In term of projects I have in mind, I really would like to add tools to fantom around test, mock, code coverage, ... Because I have the feeling for a bigger adoption of Fantom, few things need to be available: IDE support (which multiple people are already adressing) and test tools, fantom ships with a unit test tool, but I am sure more can be done here.

I know that FFI make it easy to use already existing libraries like mocking libraries, but it is not available for .NET... And I think having all that portable, written in Fan can be great.

brian Wed 25 Nov 2009

I know that FFI make it easy to use already existing libraries like mocking libraries, but it is not available for .NET... And I think having all that portable, written in Fan can be great.

I agree - we'll always use FFI to integrate other libraries. But definitely over time we'd like native Fantom solutions which use our idioms like closures, immutability, actors, and are portable.

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