Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A preview of the new Irie Tools website (created with Jump).

I have been using Jump to create the new Irie Tools website, and it's looking pretty good. So far I have completed the new home page, which you can see at the address below:

http://www.irietools.com/demos/

NOTE: Only the home page is done, so the links don't go anywhere.

As a result of my ... ahhh, how to put this kindly ... limited design skills, it has taken a long time to complete the home page, but I'm excited by the results, and Jump is working perfectly so far.

Your comments on the new home page would be greatly appreciated.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

The First Jump Template.

I have finally finished the first actual real-life Jump template. It's written using XHTML 1.0 Strict, and I've validated it with the W3C Markup Validation Service.

So now that I have a Jump template, I'm planning to use it to redo the Irie Tools website. I'm guessing that I will have to make some minor changes to the template, but I don't expect any major changes.

I've put the template on the Irie Tools website for anyone who is interested (the link is below):

First Jump Template

By the way, this is just a template, so the the text is just made-up. and links and buttons just go to the home page.

Jump first, ask questions later (sorry, I know that was corny but I couldn't resist).

Stuart
This Blog: Inside Irie Tools Limited
Website: Irie Tools Limited


Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Jump to the Rescue - an easy way to generate web pages

The Problem
Right now Irie Pascal does not provide an easy way to generate web pages, you have to use a writeln to output each line of the page. There is no way to add a web page to an Irie Pascal program without manually converting the page into a series of writeln's.

The Solution
The solution that I have come up with is a very simple language, which I'm calling Jump for the time being. Jump is so simple that I don't even know what to call it (it only has five keywords: jump, var, page, css, end). Anyway, it's simple enough that I designed it and wrote an implementation in a little over a week. I'm going to bang on the implementation a bit more before releasing it. Right now, I'm using it to redo the Irie Tools website. When that is done it should be ready for release.

In the meantime, here is a sneak preview of Jump

//Hello world Jump Program
jump
var
   //Define one variable called "message" with the value "Hello World!!!".
   //NOTE: Your program can easily change the value of the variable
   //             and thereby change the page generated.
   message
      Hello World!!!
   end message
end var
page<html><head>
<title>
   <?jump !message ?>
</title>
</head>
<body>
   <p>
    <?jump !message ?>
   </p>
</body>
</html>
end page
end jump


As you can see, most of the program is taken up by the web page. However I think in most case, you would put the page in a seperate file. So if you removed everything between the page and the end page, and put it in a file called hello.html then the program is greatly simplified as shown below.

jump
var
   //Define one variable called "message" with the value "Hello World!!!".
   //NOTE: Your program can easily change the value of the variable
   //             and thereby change the page generated.
   message
      Hello World!!!
   end message

end var
!page hello.html
end jump

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Welcome to Inside Irie Tools Limited.

What is Inside Irie Tools Limited?
Inside Irie Tools Limited gives you a look behind the website at what is going on inside Irie Tools as well as an outline of what is planned for the future. The main reason for creating this blog is to help answer questions like:
  • What kind of company is this really?
  • Who are the people behind the company (or for right now, who is the person behind the company)?
You won't find too much product or technology details here (those details will will be covered by product specific blogs, the first of which has just recently been launch, Web Programming in C).