[MUD-Dev] "From Kansas to Oz"

[clawrenc at cup.hp.com]

In <3.0.2.32.19970610230934.00a1665c at mail.tenetwork.com>, on 06/11/97 
   at 09:05 AM, Jeff Kesselman <jeffk at tenetwork.com> said:

>At 06:49 PM 6/10/97 PST8PDT, you wrote:

Uhh, Jeff, attributions please?

>>True.  They are probably the (near?) first to add a GUI drag'n'drop
>>development environment to a MUD, let alone also adding an online
>>interactive GUI debugger in the same system.  

>Ahem.
>I wrote MUDEDIT, a JAVA based interactive browser/editor/debugger for
>COLD a year ago.

Right, and while MUDEdit does use a GUI to display text windows, its
not really a GUI product.  In Sun's case they created a fully GUI
product (if crude) where objects are represented by icons with context
sensitive properties and methods.  Methods can be dragged and dropped
between objects, inhertitance can be manipulated by d'n'd, and both
the object heirarchy and the method call tree were viewable, queriable
and editable as a graphical tree.  From a GUI standpoint, objects
really did become objects.  A minor profitable comparison can be made
here to the various IBM VisualAge development environment paradigms.

Additionally the debugger did not depend on the debugged world/MUDLib
from being in a runnable state,  The actual MUD itself could be
compleatly frozen (eg *nothing* within the base heirarchy was
functional) while still allowing the debugger to be used.  The only
requirement was that the server be running, even if the MUDLib was
toast an unable to even accept a connection or output or process a
single byte.

That was the entire focus of Oz: to be able to constructively debug a
MUD object heirarchy when that heirarchy is disfunctional (if not
actively corrupt) from WITHIN the context of the MUD server.  

>P.S.  I WOULD like to read the OZ article. Is it online somewhere?

Nope.  You need to be a member of the ACM and get CACM.

--
J C Lawrence                           Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------------(*)               Internet: clawrenc at cup.hp.com
...Honorary Member Clan McFUD -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...