[FR-devel] Latest YAML format

[Rich Kilmer]

Team,

There is a question that follows this very long email...

For those that don't know, there is the cool format for config files and
serializing objects known as YAML (Yaml Ain't Markup Language).

http://www.yaml.org

And the Ruby library was presented by its author "Why the Lucky Stiff"
at RubyConf.new(2002).  I really like how clean it is compared to XML
(easy to read, edit, etc) especially for configuration files.  The
coolest thing is that the YAML parser will read in these files and
create Ruby objects for you (in other words, you don't use the parser
like in XML, just classes and objects).  At the conference I downloaded
YAML Ruby library from here:

http://yaml4r.sourceforge.net/

And built a set of plugin configuration classes:

module FreeBASE
  class Configuration; end
  class SubsystemConfiguration; end
  class PluginConfiguration; end
end

They contain the whole behavior of reading in the plugin config files
and for starting up freebase (and all the plugin dependency stuff)

A sample config file for the Debugger is:

--- !ruby/object:FreeBASE::SubsystemConfiguration 
name: DebuggerSubsystem
version: 1.0
plugins: 

  - !ruby/object:FreeBASE::PluginConfiguration 
    name: Debugger
    version: 1.0
    autoload: (true)
    require_path: plugins/Debugger/Debugger
    startup_module: FreeRIDE::GUI::Debugger
    start_dependencies: 
      GuiCore: "*"

  - !ruby/object:FreeBASE::PluginConfiguration 
    name: DebuggerRenderFox
    version: 1.0
    autoload: (true)
    require_path: plugins/Debugger/Render/Fox/DebuggerRenderFox
    startup_module: FreeRIDE::DebuggerRenderFox
    start_dependencies: 
      GuiRenderFox: "*"

Cool huh?

Q: Should we switch over to this format instead of XML?

If the answer is "no...let's use XML" then I will implement it in the
Configuration class.  I would prefer to use YAML...but I want to know
your thoughts.

-Rich

_______________________________
Rich Kilmer, InfoEther LLC
trap("SIGINT") { raise [104, 101, 108, 108].pack("cccc") }