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Limelight 0.5.0 Released

by: micah | October 19th, 2009 | 0 comments »

Today we released a new and exciting version of Limelight. Just a reminder, Limelight is a user-interface framework for Ruby. Included in this release are not only some new features, but also a new means of production(application) distribution called Playbills, and a snazzy production that documents the Limelight framework.

Playbills

Playbills is a hosted repository of available Limelight production. When you open the Limelight application, Playbills will open automatically (assuming you’re connected to the internet) and display a playbill for each production. Each Playbill provides a brief description to help you decide if you’d like to open the production. When you’re convince, click on the provided button. The production will be downloaded an opened in Limelight. Pretty nifty I think.

Limelight Docs

Among one list is a Playbill for our own Limelight Docs production. We’re quite pleased with this one. It’s a swiss army knife of documentation that should make it fairly simple for developers to build their own Limelight productions. You’ll find descriptions, walkthroughs, RDoc, and dynamic sandboxes where you can experiment with the features right inside the documentation! What’s more, the RDoc is loaded dynamically from Limelight’s runtime… You can’t get more up to date than that!

Status

Limelight has been a thrilling side project to work on. I’m very pleased with how it is turning out. We are using Limelight internally at 8th Light for a variety of projects. This release (0.5.0) is still a beta but the Framework is maturing rapidly. Although there are still a few rough spots, I’d certainly be willing to use it for production projects. Development on Limelight is active and the productivity advantages of using Limelight are hard to beat.

P.S. If you have a production you’d like listed on the Playbills server, let me know (micah at 8thlight dot com).

Simon

by: micah | November 10th, 2008 | 0 comments »

You remember the classic Simon game, right? The one where the electronic devise will blink a color and make a sound that you have to replicate by pushing the colored buttons.

At RubyConf 2008, I cornered Jim Weirich and asked his opinion on Limelight. He didn’t feel like he had seen enough of it to give a good opinion. So we found an hour where we could both sit down and build a simple Limelight production. We decided to build Simon.

The result is really quite simple. It’s a couple hundred lines of code, UI, game logic, and all. It’s also got a suite of unit tests.

If Limelight is installed, you can download the production file, and double click it, or enter the url in the Startup Limelight Production.

Limelight Production file: http://blog.8thlight.com/files/simon.llp

The Source Code can be found on github.

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