We do have some future plans for Marten that we would like to share with you. One of the most important to us is to get Marten up and running on other platforms of interest to us. |
New interpreters that run on different platforms
As mentioned above, we are trying to move Marten onto other platforms. Here are some screenshots of Marten running in conjunction with the Haiku open source operating system (think BeOS). First the interpreter ("project application") is launched on a Haiku machine. Then the Marten IDE running on a machine with (in my case ) Mac OS X 10.4.11 attempts to connect with this interpreter using a new "Open Project" dialog window:
Remote Debugging
The nice thing is that you can set breakpoints on operations and actually watch the application halt on the Haiku machine when it hits a breakpoint set on the Mac machine. Here a breakpoint has been hit in the callback code that initializes the window over on the Haiku machine. Remember, the project sits on your Mac and that is where the debugging occurs as well.
Marten application with source on a Mac running on a Haiku machine
Once the connection has been established, the content of the project sections is "piped" over to the Haiku machine, and then the application is "launched" on Haiku (remember the interpreter is already running) using the Marten "Run Application" command under the Run menu on the Mac machine. The particular application illustrated in the screenshot below is just a test application that opens a window named "Test Window" that allows the user to try out various GUI elements on Haiku:
Summary.
I won't lie. It is pretty amazing to me to see Marten running and remote debugging an application that is executing on another machine clear across the room. This functionality is all due to Jack Small and I particularly want to thank him for his significant effort. In addition, Dave Carlton has generously volunteered his time to help move this and other efforts forward and I want to thank him as well. So obviously we are excited about this capability and look forward to releasing a beta version in the near future to those who want to try it out. As Haiku is an open source system, we also are discussing what parts of Marten that might be made open source. We will keep you posted.
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