Community standards for a LEGO kit?

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue May 6 09:26:50 EDT 2014


Charles E Buchwald wrote:

 > There are DropTools, PowerTools, tmControl, MobGUI, and some others
 > which I'm sure I'm forgetting, so I daresay it's an idea that's been
 > attempted a few times.
 >
 > I like very much the idea of "a LEGO kit" for, let's say, casual or
 > beginning programmers. I've known many designers who dabble in
 > programming who would find such a thing very useful for prototyping
 > UI/UX. The few times I've shown LIveCode to kids, the drag-and-drop
 > stuff is a nice place to start.
 >
 > I think the users who are most likely to really get into that LEGO
 > kit are likely to do so with the Community version. What's the
 > possibility of a community effort towards defining a standard, or
 > some kind of interoperability, for LEGO-like components?

Of course for any such community initiative to get started it would need 
a name that doesn't include a well-established registered trademark like 
"Lego".

But you raise an important point, one a few of us add-on devs have been 
exploring with RIP, the Rev Interoperability Project:
<http://livecodejournal.com/features/rip/index.html>

Most of the stuff there at the moment is fluff, but the meat is in the 
ECMI spec:
<http://livecodejournal.com/downloads/rip/ECMI_10.rtf.zip>

ECMI stands for Edinburgh Core Metadata Initiative, a take on Dublin 
Core with a tip o' the hat to our friends at RunRev.

The goal with ECMI is to make LiveCode component interoperable and to 
some degree even discoverable.

RIP and the ECMI spec have been put into more or less a holding pattern 
at the moment, pending further discussion with Ben and the rest of the 
IDE team at RunRev.

In my Community Management meetings with them they've noted strong 
interest in exactly the sort of thing you're looking for, and as soon as 
some of the other core engine tasks get completed they'll be able to 
focus more on that.

In the meantime, the ECMI spec represents a good starting point for 
discussion of such interoperability issues, and I would encourage anyone 
in the community interested in exploring greater integration among tools 
to feel free to sign into the forums there.


Note about the RIP forum:

If you have any difficulty creating an account in those forums, just 
drop me a note with your IP address and I can take care of it.  We had a 
rash of spambots attacking the site a couple years ago, and the only way 
I could get back to work was to block unusually large swaths of IP 
addresses. Many of those blocked ranges have since been narrowed back, 
but if you have any issues just let me know and I can trim some more.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys





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