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

The Researcher researcher0x00 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 11 16:18:38 PDT 2011


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


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