Using Emacs to develop Mojo apps for webOS

The latest technology I've been learning is Palm's SDK for webOS, Mojo.  My first impression is that it's a great platform and Palm could do a great job of 2.0 if they cut down on some of the verbosity of gluing together the UI.  I have learned to like JavaScript over the years as I learned that despite its warts there are good parts too.  If you squint just right you can see that it's scheme with Algol syntax.  HTML and CSS are what they are, but with WebKit running the show and only a single engine to target it's not that bad.  I've gone from Eclipse to Emacs for the coding itself and highly recommend Emacs for Mojo development.  There is nothing that I miss from the Eclipse or Komodo Edit thanks to the fact that Mojo uses open languages and standards.

As far as actual development goes the Mojo documentation steers you towards a combination of Eclipse, Palm's Mojo plugin for Eclipse, and the Aptana Studio plugin.  My editor of choice is Emacs but I decided to give it a spin just to get started quickly, how bad could it be? I'm not going to get into details but I will say that I don't think I'll ever use Eclipse for anything; it's far too sluggish and provides no compelling features for the languages that I use.  I tried Komodo Edit and it was significantly better but still not for me.  Emacs is great for editing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS so all I really missed from the IDEs were the shortcuts to package, install, and launch apps in the emulator.  I headed over to the Emacs Wiki and downloaded Jonathan Arkell's Mojo support for Emacs which provided a great base to get started with.  There are wrappers around (all?) of the Palm SDK commands but it needed a bit of work to make it just do what I wanted with as little input and thought as possible.

A couple of of Lisp hacking sessions later and I'm happy enough with mojo.el to bump the version to v0.9.  I've checked off what I feel are the most important checkpoints on the webOS Internals comparison of editors and the framework is in place to make implementing most of the remaining commands very trivial.  I might take a bit of time today to flesh things out just to check more points off so people feel more confident that it's a fully featured environment, because it certainly is.

It now requires json.el in order to parse appinfo.json. json.el might be included with Emacs if you have a very recent version, otherwise you can google for it or get it from my config file repo on github where you can also find my latest version of mojo.el.  You still just (require 'mojo) in your .emacs file.

The wrappers around Palm SDK commands now search upwards for the Mojo project root directory (from the default-directory for current-buffer) and parse appinfo.json to give you sane defaults for mojo-package, mojo-install, mojo-launch, mojo-delete, and mojo-inspect.  You can list installed apps and when entering app ids there is completion and history, as you have come to expect in Emacs.  The most useful command for development is mojo-package-install-and-inspect which does exactly what it says: packages, installs, and launches the application for inspection.  No interaction is required as long as you are editing a buffer inside your Mojo project.

If you read the install instructions in mojo.el and decide to setup some keybindings then you will have single-task commands for packaging, installing, launching, or all three steps at once.

Please give me some feedback if you try this out.  I've developed it on Mac OS X and Jonathan on Windows so please try it on Linux and send me a patch or even better a pull request on github if it needs some work. There is room for improvement. The next feature on my radar before I would consider it worthy of a v1.0 tag is intelligent switching to corresponding buffers, e.g. mojo-switch-to-view, mojo-switch-to-assistant, things like that. Basically things I miss from the Rails package for Emacs.

Happy hacking!

Yet another compiler posted to github, and first post

Tonight I pushed a pet compiler project I have been working on to github. It's my first code on github and I hadn't really intended on making it public. I'll be quite surprised if anyone is interested in it at the moment, the README doesn't even explain where to start.  Oh well, I will fix it up for public consumption later.  Release early and often.

Every programmer thinks he knows what his perfect language looks like, I am no different. Right now it's little more than turing complete, but it parses a small language and outputs x86 machine code. Only Mach-O binaries on OS X work at the moment but ELF support on Linux is imminent. The assembler is homegrown and done in Ruby but only assembles the subset of x86 needed to compile ... whatever I might call this language in the future.

I'm not sure what the end result will be at all but traits I think a modern language should include are:

• Immutable data structures
• Literal notation for hashes, arrays, closures, etc.
• Multiple block support (possibly io style)
• Optional OO
• AOT and JIT compilation to machine code
• Platform independent, widely ported
• FFI
• GC (need I mention this anymore?)

That's it off the top of my head.  Factor, Clojure, Ruby, JavaScript, and C# are languages worth stealing from.  These may overlap but also io, SmallTalk, Python, Java, C, Lisp, Scheme.  I hope to write up some on exactly what I like from each of these languages in the future.  Till then.