BodyBuilder
In the VisualWorks Smalltalk community there is a conspicuous absence of tools to automate complex builds. Those shops that needed build tools that go beyond the capabilities of the standard package loader all have 'rolled their own', as a consequence no common idiom has emerged in the community concerning build matters.
Developing an automated build tool is very expensive in terms of time because a single edit-debug cycle may take well over 15 minutes for some common build operations, hence privatly-grown automated build tools are hard to evolve.
The goal of this project is to evolve a small abstract framework and a set of extensions that implement specific build tasks. It has to be robust enough to be used in the industry, issues like agility, scalability and backward compatibility must be addressed early on.
The project will focus on framework construction as opposed to providing a GUI. It is envisioned that supplying standard IDE integration hooks and plugins is much more powerful than maintaining our own GUI tool set.
An other vision is that the basic build language could be a subset of Smalltalk with compatible semantics, this would enable existing tools such as the RefactoringBrowser, SmallLint, typecheckers, profilers, complexity analyzers, code vizualization tools, etc to operate on build scripts thus reducing the need of special tools.