This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Server, heal thy-self
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
One of the joys in Smalltalk are the moments when you write only a tiny little bit of code to achieve a great deal. Take my latest example - James has been enjoying updating his servers by filing in snippits of code to remedy problems. I've now got a similar sort of answer - though slightly more sophisticated.
You've all heard James go on and on about how Smalltalk is dynamic and can change itself on the fly - but it's really something else to experience it (over and over again). I've set up my web server to connect to our code repository every now and then and check to see if I've released any new code.
Publishing code isn't enough, it has to be released - but that's no big deal. You click in the drop down "released" instead of "development". The server will then replace its running code with the new code and keep on going without even batting an eyelid.
The great thing about this is now just that I can hot-patch the system (or even add in an admin facility to force it to do an update -now-) but that I can be programming on two different machines. I increase the update rate to something stupid - like 4 times a minute, then I start coding away on my desktop and the server keeps up! I can test my code on the server without even having to touch the thing. I love VNC and all, but this is much better.
Another technology of a similar ilk I made once before was a synchroniser. It kept two images in sync -as- the developers changed them independently - wherever in the world they were. This was a lot of fun, but the lag really got to us and what we rreally needed was a way to share the windows so we could show each other code and discuss things. Perhaps in the future... (coincidently, this was what TypeLess was originally conceived for)
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