This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Adding Scripting to an application Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

ISerializable is writing a series on adding scripting to an application. The reasons he gives for it are good ones:

Adding scripting support to your application is one of the most valuable things you can do for your client, letting them add value to your software, and keep it current over time with little or no overhead from the developers. Your users will be able to modify behavior at runtime, change business rules as the market changes and fix subtle bugs as they appear until better fixes come along in the form of compiled code. It is one of the most powerful techniques today employed my many varied business applications. But guess what? Its not very easy to do in .Net.

Now for the punchline - BottomFeeder has scripting support - on all supported platforms - in the same language the application was built in. And I didn't need to do anything to add it. All I had to do was deploy the application without removing the compiler. Here's how you can use it at startup - create a Smalltalk script, and save it in a file called ".btfrc" - put that in the same directory with the application. At startup, that script will be loaded.

I don't have a nice way to pop up a runtime workspace, but it can be done - Vassili explained how. So yeah, adding scripting support is a very nice thing - take a look at what Bob W does with it, for instance. I'll be interested in seeing how one does that in .NET