Brass SSE Developer Guide - An Introduction
Want to see a demo before you dive right in? Not
sure how easy it will be to make a plugin?
Click here for a
Flash movie that shows you how - you'll be amazed how easy it
is!
What are SSE's?
"SSE" stands for "ShinySource Executable",
small programs that run inside Brass as plugins just like Newsgrinder,
Dilbert Daily and all the other plugins. But slightly differently
;)
It's very easy to write an SSE plugin for Brass, even if you have
no programming experience at all. Anyone with even a basic understanding
of programming in BASIC or C will be able to write their first plugin
after just a few minutes of reading.
If you can't program, don't worry! You can use a graphical development
environment to simply drag and drop components for your plugin!
Since version 0.2 Brass has had it's own language called "Shiny".
This language works just like BASIC or C and has access to all of
Brass' functionality. To create an SSE simply write the code in
the supplied SSEdit tool, compile it and send it to Brass.
It's own language? Won't that be hard to learn?
Not at all. There are only 30 or so "commands" in the
language, all very easy to use and remember. The language also supports
implicit type conversion - this means you can assign non-similar
types to each other. For example, let's say you want to display
the current day of the month on screen. In most languages you would
be forced to convert the day from a number type to a string type
then join 2 strings to get the final result you want. Shiny does
away with all that. Here's some sample code in Shiny:
number
MyHouseNumber
= 30;
drawtext("My
house number is " + MyHouseNumber);
Shiny can convert between all its core types without any extra
work for you.
Shiny also has some amazing extended functionality. Here's all
the code you need to download a file from a website:
webdlfile("http://some.site.com/file.zip",
"c:\downloads\file.zip");
One single line of code to download a file! The same simple system
is used for drawing images on the screen, displaying text, reading
data from websites and much more.
Wow, that's easy! How do I learn?
In the developer section of the website are tutorials as well as
lots of sample programs for you to use, change and learn from. And
of course you can always post on the Brass forum if you need help
with your code.
Can you explain SSE's in a bit more detail?
Sure! All SSE's start out the same way, as an SSN (ShinySource
Node) in the SSEdit tool. SSEdit is a specially developed editor
that understands the Shiny language and is installed along with
Brass. You'll find it in your Start menu in the Brass program group.
Within SSEdit is a "wizardbar" that lists all the handlers
Brass knows about. To build an SSE you simply select the handler
you want to, er, handle, and add some code to it. The principle
is exactly the same as Visual Basic, MFC or any other GUI development
system.
Once you've written code for the handlers (for example, text display
in the "Render" handler), you compile your code to a ShinySource
Executable (the SSE!).
The compiler produces the SSE for you, which you then deploy to
the Brass SSE folder. That's all there is to it!
Hold on, you said compiler?
You just noticed the most technically important part of the entire
system. Most applications use a "script interpreter" to
provide the same kind of functionality. Creating a script interpreter
is easy for the developers but it has serious implications. Scripting
languages are extremely slow. When the application runs a script
it must first interpret the code it finds, then execute that interpreted
code. This makes it very, very slow. Javascript is a classic example
of a scripting language - it was originally designed to provide
some extra functionality for websites. Unfortunately it's been incredibly
abused and misused as a scripting language for desktop applications.
Shiny is not an interpreted script language. The Shiny compiler
takes your source code and compiles it into "bytecode".
This bytecode is then run in a virtual stack machine inside Brass
itself. This is the same technique used by commercial development
languages such as Java, and it makes SSE's extremely fast.
SSEdit and Brass hide all of these details from you though, so
if you're not really sure what those 2 paragraphs meant then don't
worry! It's time to start the tutorials!
|
