The Freak Parade

Ernst Naezer has generously contributed some very welcome enhancements to the Simple State Machine that adds new extensibility points and support for database workflow persistence, allowing the default file system workflow persistence mechanism to be replaced. Ernst has also provided a nice, concise tutorial on using this new feature with Castle ActiveRecord. The tutorial even contains a fully functional sample application demonstrating the persistence technique. I will probably add the sample to the main project at some point, but for now the sample can be downloaded from a link on wiki page.

Thanks to Ernst for all his hard work on this library.

Boo is an interesting, extremely flexible CLR language with an “open compiler architecture” – which means that you can easily extend its compiler to accommodate your needs. I bought a Manning Early Access Program (unfinished, unedited, and rough around the edges) book by Ayende Rahien called Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo that, despite the writing style, which conveys an accent and is so informal that it almost borders on the insane, has already proven quite useful. The book relies on an open source library, also by Ayende Rahien (of Rhino Mocks fame) called Rhino DSL. The library itself is small, simple and effective. In addition to DSL’s, Boo (which is a statically typed, compiled language) has an optional interpreter and seems like it could be effectively used as a runtime scripting language, in addition of course to being a full blown .NET language you could write your business objects or UI in.

Anyway, below are a few resources I have come across while researching this topic in support of creating a state machine DSL referenced in my previous post:

Scripting With Boo
Binsor : Castle IOC container configuration using Boo DSL from Ayende

DSL Support
Early Access Book: Building DSLs in Boo (Ayende)

Specter Framework – writing executable object specs using a Boo DSL

An interesting example of TDD using Specter
Article on DSL’s using BOO by Ayende

A list of open source apps written in boo

Martin Fowler is writing a book on DSL’s also

Using Boo as an embedded scripting language

Visual Studio Integration via BooLangStudio

SimpleStateMachine project using a Boo DSL for configuration