[IPython-dev] Message spec draft more fleshed out

[Wendell Smith]

  Hello all,

I have been looking all these documents over, and wondering if perhaps 
we could have some object (descended from KernelManager) that would be 
constructed to perfectly match the message spec, such that any message 
received would translate to a functional call (i.e. 
MessageManager.execute(self, header, code, silent=False)), to make it 
easy for someone to simply write an object that descends from 
MessageManager (or whatever we call it) and fill in the methods. This 
would also then serve as a message spec - it should be created such that 
it can receive any valid message and sends only (and can send all) valid 
messages.

Of course, this may not make sense, and I may not know what I'm talking 
about - I don't know much about the zmq communication, and was sort of 
hoping to stay focused on the fancy console frontend without delving too 
deeply into that, but if others agree with me but no one with better 
knowledge wants to do it, I would be happy to write the necessary code 
myself, but again, I'm probably not the one best able to do it.

Speaking of combined code, it would also be nice to have a 
frontend.pygmentize module that covers pygments coloring for input, 
output, prompts, and tracebacks, providing a lexer and a style from 
config, (formatters would depend on the frontend), and also perhaps some 
object that takes a formatter and provides all these tools for the 
frontend, perhaps even descending from KernelManager and just having 
methods that manage these. That would be nice. I could work on that too, 
and would be happy too - I just noticed that at least Evan and I have 
written pygments code, and it would be nice to avoid code duplication.

Anyways, I just feel like we've got 4 people working away on 4 frontends 
without too much communication going on about useful common code, and it 
would be nice to get that sort of work delegated out before we all go 
and write our own versions of the same tools.

Please let me know if this makes sense and is a good idea - I am 
certainly not the most knowledgeable here, and if I seem to be missing 
something, please let me know!

-Wendell

On 08/13/2010 04:27 PM, Brian Granger wrote:
> I have this in a browser tab and will review it soon.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Brian
>
> On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Fernando Perez<fperez.net at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Brian Granger<ellisonbg at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Very good points.  I think we should just copy this description into the
>>> message spec.
>> I just updated the doc and pushed to trunk and a build with Min's text:
>>
>> http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/nightly/html/development/messaging.html#heartbeat-for-kernels
>>
>> Modulo final feedback, that design spec is reasonably complete, as far
>> as I'm concerned.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> f
>>
>
>