Lynx Project Explorer Future?

[Frederick J. Harris]

I've been wondering a bit lately about the Lynx Project Explorer.  Its been awhile since I was at the Zipperty Software site so I went there today and read up on it some.  Actually, I was wondering who Zipperty Software is (kind of relates to a recent hot issue around here, doesn't it?)?  

Lynx is certainly a well written piece of software; it continues to function even though there is no capacity to deal with classes in PowerBASIC.  I don't think it handles thread functions either.  It seems a shame to let this excellent piece of software fall by the wayside.  Does anyone have any knowledge of what became of the source code?  On the Zipperty site it is mentioned that the owner was going to make it available, as he/she had no intention of developing it further.

[José Roca]

 
In October 11, 207, Paul Noble, author of Lynx, said in the Planet Squires Software forum:

Sorry, I have been slow to release the Lynx source code (..it's very nearly ready), and I hadn't realised that PB Help was now in CHM format. I am looking into it, and will report back. Give me a little while though please.

And in October 12, 2007, he said (regarding the problem with .CHM files):

Anyway, this is what I am looking at correcting at the moment, and I'm nearly complete

The rest is silence.

[Patrice Terrier]

Ed,

Paul, is a very nice guy, did you try to write him directly?

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[Paul Squires]

Paul is a really great guy. We worked closely together a few years ago on the Lynx/JellyFish integration. He taught me a lot about many programming issues back then. He is such a grounded person - very level headed and great to work with. The last emails that I got from him were in October 2007. He does not program in PB anymore and hasn't for a long while. I believe that he settled on C# as his language of choice (because of its commercial appeal). I doubt that you will see an update to the Lynx project. To my knowledge Paul never did release any of the source code to the project. Pop him an email... you never know, maybe he will donate the code to the community.

[Frederick J. Harris]

Thanks for the info.  I sent an email to Paul Noble at paul at zippety dot net.  Also found this link at the PowerBASIC Forums...

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showthread.php?t=28035&highlight=Paul+Noble

Apparently Paul updated it for versions 4, 8.  The only really material way it fails is that it doesn't show any methods of classes.  In terms of thread functions it lists the variables but just shows 'ERRORS' for the function name.  I don't know how hard it would be to update this, but it would be awesome to see an update somehow. 

[Frederick J. Harris]

Paul very graciously returned my email and it appears he will eventually release the source code to Lynx to the PowerBASIC community.  The problem I expect is that Lynx is a very involved program, and he is really trying to provide documentation on it along with the release.  So we'll just have to patiently wait. 

As an aside, it appears that if thread functions use the normal syntax of not being preceded like so...

Thread Function(....

and just look this way...

Function SomeThreadFunction(....

Then Lynx will satisfactorily recognize and parse it.  So all that will be left to do is somehow update the TreeView code to recognize the 'class' keyword.  However, Paul does not believe it will be an easy task.

   

[Patrice Terrier]

I just had some fresh news from Paul, and i gave him the URL of this website, in case he wants to enrole.

He is now an IT contractor/consultant, using Access (VBA), VB and SQL Server.
He also obtain a Microsoft MCTS certification in C# and ASP.NET.

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