[Templates] TT3 status

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Simon Wistow wrote:
> Any chance of a TT3 status update? Anythign we can do to help? 

Yep.

A large chunk of TT3 design and development was completed between December
and March, while Fotango were funding me to work on it.  I spent roughly 
two months working on the new scanner/parser/compiler architecture, a month
thrashing out the architecture of what will become a replacement for the 
context object, and a month working on Template Sitemap which has some 
particular relevance for Fotango, and also relates in a subtle but important
way to how the new context will work.

I also spent some time looking in depth at Mason.  Mason has some very 
nice features that I wanted to incorporate into TT3.  However, I ended
up working towards a convergence of the two.  I'm hoping that TT3 (or 
maybe TT4) will be able to support both TT and Mason templates (or something 
very similar), and pretty much any other template language you care to 
create, all within the same processing framework.  

Don't you think it would be great to be able to call a Mason component from 
a TT template, and vice-versa?  Mason is not the only friend we want to 
play more nicely with in TT3, of course, but it's one of the most complex 
and feature-laden.  I figure that if I can make TT3 work (for some definition
of "work") with Mason, then anything else should be a walk in the park.

So things were going well at the end of March when I returned to Canon 
Research at the end of my secondment.  A great deal had been done, but there 
were a couple of major design issues that I was blocking on.  It was a good 
time to back off from coding for a few weeks to take in the big picture and 
think about how best to resolve these issues.

But that was when things got, erm, "interesting".  Canon announced that they 
were effectively pulling their R&D funding from the UK and taking it back to 
Japan.  The lab would be closing at the end of June and we would all be made
redundant.  The process dragged out over a tedious 3 months, during which 
nothing much happened at all (in TT or anything else).  Legals constraints
prevented me from discussing the matter or making a public announcement (to
this list, for example) until my "release papers" were signed, and even then,
I wasn't really sure what to say.

Feeling rather demotivated and disheartened by the whole process I then did a 
rather radical thing and turned my computer off for a while.  I know, it's
a crazy concept, but I can be a pretty crazy guy sometimes :-)

I've spent the last month or so most inhabiting the "Real World".  I've
been skateboarding, flying kites (and designing a new one, expected to go 
into production later this year), spending time with my family, and doing 
all those things that I haven't had time to do over the last 7 years because 
I was too pre-occupied with TT and other things going on at CRE.

Having said that, I have been dipping in and out of TT3 design issues and 
figuring out what to do next.  The rest of August is a write-off for me, 
but I'm expecting to get back into hard core TT3 development in September.
First task will be to go over everything I've written and decide what works
and what doesn't (there's still a good deal of experimentation going on in 
some parts that needs to be solidified), clean it up, get it working, check
everything in, and then update the web site to reflect the current status.

I reckon I've got a good few months left before the money starts running 
out (Canon++ for a good settlement package) and I'm not planning to take
on anything else major in the short term so that I've got time to finish the
bits that I need to finish in TT3 (deep core stuff).  Then it should be 
in some kind of state to let you guys start crawling over it.

More than that I can't say because I haven't figured it out yet.  :-)

A


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