Fixes, more docs, examples and what are we doing?

[scripting]

This is starting to feel like a product ship.

Drummer == the smaller Frontier for the web

I was asked what are we doing here?

It's pretty simple. I'm retracing the steps that led to Frontier in the early 90s, except I'm aiming for the smaller product we were initially going to ship until Apple stated their intentions with AppleScript. We went big. I want Drummer to start small.

Drummer's apps are accessible through APIs on the web. Another difference, at first Frontier's connections were on the same machine, and later extended to the web (that's what SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS and OPML were for).

A blog post I did in April tells the story.

JavaScriptScript

The language of Drummer is JavaScriptScript (a technically accurate name, not sure it'll be the actual name). I did reserve the domain name.

The big idea in JSS is there is no difference in syntax between synchronous and asynchronous functions. In that it's like most other languages, C, Pascal, Python, Perl, etc.

Two big ideas in Frontier

There were two big ideas in Frontier.

1. Why choose between a GUI and a command line. Why not have both.

2. Integrated apps had run their course. I had just shipped an outliner with an integrated presenter, but some people wanted the outliner and didn't care about presentations and others wanted the presenter and not the outliner. They were right, they should be able to choose their endpoints, and hook them together as they please.

These are the same big ideas in Drummer. And they're just as current in 2021 as they were in 1989. We, collectively, forgot how to do this.

What's new today

Lots of bug fixes today, written up in the Change Notes, which you can access through the Docs menu in Drummer.

Every day there will be more example scripts in the DW menu. If you can't catch up today, do it tomorrow or the day after. The scripts will still be there.

Important for devs

I have now documented the user experience for Instant Outlines.

This is a doc you will want to read when you're considering how to support interop based on OPML. You don't have to do the web sockets. But you should consider this UI as prior art before implementing yours.

See you tomorrow! ;-)

Dave