https://bitbucket.org/afrankvt/markdown

Markdown is a great little plain-text format created by John Gruber that converts nicely to HTML. Fantom’s own Fandoc was heavily inspired by Markdown. We just simplified a few things and added some Fantom conventions in a few places. But I’ve wanted the full Markdown syntax at my disposal for some time now.

Luckily it was a pretty simple project - I was able to essentially take the great Markdownj work as-is and wrap with a native Fantom API. Code is available over at BitBucket and is licensed under the BSD license.

https://bitbucket.org/afrankvt/less

LESS is a great little “extension” to CSS that adds lots of convenient features like variables, mixins, and nested rules that make developing and managing complex CSS much easier.

The Fantom wrapper adds:

• An API interface to compile LESS files from a Str input or a File reference
• A simple command line interface for compiling LESS files to CSS files
• A BuildTask for integrating LESS into your Fantom build pipeline

Draft Mini Web Framework

Draft is a small web framework designed to notch in above WebMod, provide some useful features, while trying to leave as much freedom as possible for your app. Details over on the project site.

Its still a work in progress, but decided it was far enough along to start being useful to anyone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty. Hopefully I’ll have it wrapped up here in the next few months, and can be more generally useful to developers looking for a simple and lightweight solution for developing web apps in Fantom.

First was a little sketch of a potential logo for the Fantom language. For whatever reason, when we changed the name to Fantom, I got this 1920s/Art Deco motif concept in my head (hence the typeface). I’m pretty sure its because of the movie The Shadow, but I keep trying to tell myself thats not the case… Never really had time to come up with a real logo — but this is one I sorta liked.

Second was a logo for the Axon scripting language we designed for our day job at SkyFoundry. Would love to give these both some good Photoshop treatment if I ever find the time.

Creating a “blue collar” language isn’t something that happens every day.

When done by “blue collar” people who have sketchy knowledge of programming language theory, the result is often problematic. Look at PHP–I trust that I won’t have to elaborate… Or Groovy, many of whose properties (particularly in the MOP) are under-specified and constantly shifting.

Few “white collar” people have an interest in designing a blue-collar language. They give us languages that dazzle us with their brilliance and innovation. After all, that’s what a researcher is rewarded for.

Interestingly he made no mention of Fantom in this context, which means I assume he hasn’t looked at it any detail. That was one of the explicit design goals.

Which makes me wonder - do people pass over Fantom because of the exact same reasons they search for new languages? You want a simpler, more expressive language, with great APIs, that make your life easier 9-5. But you take a look at Fantom, and move right along, since you don’t see buzzwords like monads, or some ground breaking new syntax?

Read the full post at Fantom.org

SkySpark is turning out to be an awesome platform for visualizing, analyzing, and managing mountains of data. We’ve updated the website to include some high level technical documentation on the software stack. Its built 100% in Fantom - including all the client-side browser code using the Fantom JavaScript compiler.

This software has really validated the years of effort we’ve put into making Fantom a first-class language. I don’t think we’d have been able to build anything even close without it. I’m excited to show off more as we move towards the official release.

http://bitbucket.org/afrankvt/fanast/

Its pretty crude, but works, and should be pretty easy to fix or modify to suite your needs.