Spork – Zork via “M”

Marquee de Sells - If you liked Zork, you'll love Spork!

“Spork is a sample of an end-to-end application using M and the Repository. It starts by defining a set of M types that describe the data needed for a text adventure along the lines of the famous Infocom game Zork (and hence the corporate bad-café-inspired name). …”

Spork ReadMe

“Spork is a sample of an end-to-end application using M and the Repository. It starts by defining a set of M types that describe the data needed for a text adventure along the lines of the famous Infocom game Zork (and hence the corporate bad-café-inspired name). The M instances are generated by running a custom compiler developed with the VBA (Visual Basic for Adventures) MGrammar grammar. We also provide a runtime driven by adventure data loaded into the Repository in multiple versions of the types called AdvRunner.

Follow along with the video to see Spork in action or follow along with the Setup & Usage section of this document.

Requirements

You need the Microsoft Oslo SDK October 2008 CTP (aka the PDC08 drop) installed and the repository database created to run this sample. You’ll need Visual Studio 2008 installed to build it.

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Interesting…

For me M/Oslo is on a very low priority background thread, one that I’m going to let idle for a while yet, yet still I see a promise in its Textual DSL (TDSL) concept.

I’d love to be able to provide a TDSL for my business processes, allowing my dev team to focus on the actual business problems and not on the underlying goo. API’s/SDK’s/Frameworks only go so far, and, all to often, internal ones don’t go far enough yet add significant overhead, in both code and training. I’m thinking that M and TDSL’s might help with that…