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Hello everybody.
I’ve been fooling around with BrickOS in the last few weeks, becoming familiar
with it. BrickOS is very cool. Thank you, those who have made it what it is,
and thank you, those who help out those with the common problems (yes, I had the
usual ones (what's with the @#$ unterminated string error #4%), but eventually
figured them out with the help of the advice from these pages). Lastly, thank
you LUGNET for hosting these pages.
About me ? I do this kind of stuff for a living, but am not getting my fix at
work at the moment ;o) - so I wanted to look around for a platform to try out
and demonstrate active object programming. BrickOS and Mindstorms are great to
fool around with.
Goals ? Other than fooling around with the OS 8-) I'd like to put a course
together to teach active object programming, with the assistance of a framework
(and obviously a platform to run it on !)
What is "active object programming" ? It is a design style, where an
application is composed of a number of active objects who communicate by passing
messages to each other. It is in vogue with tool vendors and consultants (I'm
not from either group). An active object is a fancy name for a state machine.
It can accept events from any of its designated inputs at any time, and it
reacts to those events, possibly changing state and sending events / messages to
other objects. The key thing about an active object is that the only time that
it blocks is to receive an event. And when it blocks, it is able to receive any
event.
The simple interface of an active object means that designing the tasking model
is much simpler than with 'traditional' styles. Many applications do not
require any scheduler in the conventional sense.
That is a little about my world view. But I don't want to start a religous
debate - there are plenty of other styles that are equally valid, and the little
yellow brick is such a cool platform for fooling around with them ! I think
that it is great as a "get started" OS for those wanting to start trying out
these sorts of ideas.
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