[ANNOUNCEMENT] New Project: Amadeus Community Edition for the Eclipse Platform

[Bob Calco]

Everyone:

Today I registered a new project with SourceForge to develop a new IDE for
Mozart-Oz based on the Eclipse 3.01 platform. Officially I call it "Amadeus
Community Edition for the Eclipse Platform", or "Amadeus CE" for short.
Whether or not they approve it I plan to move forward with it somewhere,
somehow.

I have separate plans for a commercial Windows IDE and an implementation for
Oz on .NET, but they are longer term. I have other commercial products I'd
like to build that use Oz under the hood that are higher priority, because
they have enormous market potential. Have to be rational about this, at some
point. :)

My goal for the Amadeus CE project is to manage the development of an
industrial-strength, open-source, free Mozart development environment that I
or anybody else can use to take Mozart to the next level, whatever that
means. At a minimum, it will support the following project types with
wizards, templates and other goodies:

	* Mozart Distribution Project
	* MOGUL Package Project
		* Native Functor
		* Application
		* CPI Extension
		* GUMP front end
	* MOGUL Solution
		(can contain multiple MOGUL package projects)

Eventually I want to support higher-level projects such as:

	* Mobile Agent Project
	* Constraint Web Service

And so on, but we must crawl before we walk before we run. A lesson that is
finally starting to sink into my thick (my wife would contend impervious)
skull. :)

All projects will be built atop Ozmake in a way that is seamless to the
user. It will integrate with CVS and support uploading of files to where
MOGUL can find them. It will support downloading and installing MOGUL
packages directly from MOGUL to the local Oz installation.

The idea is that once the user has installed Amadeus CE, (s)he can build Oz
from the source on any platform (provided the required pieces and parts are
in place, such as Cygwin on Windows), and get busy writing MOGUL packages
via Ozmake, and custom distributions of Oz. Other tools will evolve over
time -- such as refactoring tools, collaboration tools, etc.

All functions of the current OPI that are practical to carry over will be
supported in Amadeus -- interactive programming, compiling, debugging, the
Browser, the Inspector, the Oz Panel, etc. Initially these will use the
Tcl/Tk implementations already available but I'd like to see perhaps and SWT
or some other widget integration (such as wxWidgets) eventually to evolve.

I chose Eclipse for the obvious reason: Despite my personal aversion to
Java, it's a very mature, well-designed platform for an IDE, and represents
probably the shortest distance between having no alternative to the OPI and
have a great alternative to the OPI. 

I decided that the company I created last year, SoftCraft Solutions, Inc.,
will engage in both commercial and open source development, and Amadues CE
is the first project in the latter category that I'm actively working on.
Any donations made to Amadeus CE (via SourceForge's Donations feature) will
be split as follows:

	10% to sourceforge for hosting
	40% to SoftCraft to fund open source initiatives ONLY
	50% to the Mozart Consortium or whatever its evolutionary successor
is

I will also donate an undetermined portion of commercial proceeds to
supporting the core Mozart project; they are currently undetermined because
my commercial plans for Mozart are on hold until Amadeus CE is done.

I chose sourceforge because, well, I can't host CVS at this time myself, and
so they save me a certain number of headaches in promoting development of
Amadeus CE. Be happy to accept whoever wants to join on the project, or
alternative ways to manage the project. 

The initial phase, naturally, is requirements gathering. I mentioned some
requirements at a high level but the first task is to flesh them out and
then spec them against the Eclipse plug-in API. I suppose this newsgroup
makes the most sense for such discussions.

Let 2005 be the year I actually contribute something back to the Mozart
development community, to which I owe much in terms of my current knowledge
of computer science. The Big Oz Book alone has given me a depth of knowledge
in areas I never would have encountered in industry, and spawned more new
ideas for software technology than I've been able to handle--but I'm trying
to change that.

This represents my most sincere effort to date to start making the
possibilities for Oz that I see in my head something someone else can
actually use to good purpose on their computer.

:)

Sincerely,


Bob Calco
SoftCraft Solutions, Inc.
PO Box 1108
Alachua, FL 32616
352.278.1140 - cell
Bob.Calco at softcraft-solutions.com
bobcalco at alltel.net