Status Update

[Christoph Dorn]

Here is a quick update as to the status of Developer Companion.

The current implementation available at http://developercompanion.com/ was the second implementation of DeveloperCompanion on a prototype application platform available here (NOTE: development has stalled): https://github.com/pinf/loader-js

You can find a video going into the detail of the loader here: http://vimeo.com/31089051

The purpose of the application platform is to coordinate many plugins into a cohesive toolchain to support software development with a HTML5 UI. To automatically get good intelligence from every level of the application you need to model the application and do so as much as possible without burdening the developer. In the end I arrived at a bunch of fundamental rules along the lines of https://github.com/sourcemint/sm/blob/master/docs/Rules.md that can be built upon to describe components within a system and their relationships relying only on configuration files, static code and runtime analysis together with annotations.

One can then model existing systems to gain insight and gradual control or build new systems exclusively by the fundamental rules and get intelligence and portability automatically which encourages plug and play component sharing.

Over the past two years I have been implementing tooling in NodeJS to build the next version of this application platform.

When I start releasing components over the next year there will be some changes:

DeveloperCompanion in its current form will be discontinued. Anyone who has purchased a license will get access to "Ginseng", the new client tool that is built on the latest NodeJS based application platform and will take the place of the "Companion Window".

A new 100% open source DeveloperCompanion client application built on https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit will be released that is 100% plugin compatible with Ginseng. You can then develop and publish your own plugins 100% open source and in JavaScript with DeveloperCompanion or choose to use Ginseng which speeds plugin and component development up with advanced tooling and provides complete management of all your toolchains.

Ginseng will cost $99 one-time as per usual and all licensed DeveloperCompanion users will get their Ginseng license for free.

Ginseng will also have monthly and usage based subscription features to further enhance productivity.

Having this kind of toolchain in code has been a long-time dream of mine. Getting closer to having something working is truly exiting after so many years of work.

Thanks for your continued support.

Christoph