[antlr-interest] ANTLR virtual appliance i.e. prebundled ANTLR for a virtual machine.

[Parsiad Azimzadeh]

Would this be more than some linux distro with GNOME (or some other
easy-to-use dm & wm), the JDK, an ANTLR library and  ANTLRWorks on it? It
could not hurt to throw together. It would certainly increase the number of
users willing to try ANTLR. I am, however, curious as to whether or not you
wanted to add anything else to the image to ease the end-user development
experience.

-- 
Parsiad Azimzadeh
http://sfu.ca/~paa4

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:18 PM, The Researcher <researcher0x00 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Since ANTLR is a starting point for a lot of people learning parsing I was
> wondering if we should create an ANTLR virtual appliance.
>
> For those not familiar with the term virtual appliance, it is an
> application
> such as ANTLR that is preconfigured and installed on an OS and then
> converted into a set of files that run on a virtual machine such as VMware,
> Virtual Box, etc. A virtual machine that host a virtual appliance is called
> a player. Most players are free downloads from the vendor. For free
> software
> such as Virtual Box no money is needed to create a virtual appliance. For
> for profit companies such as VMware a separate purchased application is
> needed to create the virtual appliance. So the using of the appliance is
> free, the cost to create one is dependent on the vendor. The appliance
> would probably be created once every several months to keep up with stable
> ANTLR releases.
>
> The  benefits to this would be that those learning ATNLR would be using a
> known standard that anyone could access. If the person needed help, then
> the
> appliance with the grammar should be sufficient to reproduce the problem.
> Another benefit is that the appliance could be setup so the user could
> concentrate on learning ANTLR and not downloading, installing, configuring
> and hoping.
>
> I would be willing to create  a rough cut of one if we could agree on a few
> basics such as
> 1. Virtual appliance player, VMware, Virtual Box or another.
> 2. OS. It will have to be free, so some version of Linux. This means C#
> would have to be on Mono or something.
> 3. One back end or multiples. I opt for Java only since it is free and will
> work on LINUX.
> 4. Version of ANTLR. Something recent but known to be stable.
> 5. Some way of validating that ATNLR has not been tampered with. Some form
> of CRC or hash on the files.
> 6. SInce this will be a several meg file, could we host it www.antlr.org,
> or
> park at some other repository.
>
> Any thoughts or input is welcome.
>
> Thanks
>
> Eric
>