Idea: MPS paste service (pastebin)
I have an idea for a side project: a paste service that would allow developers to exchange snippets of MPS code. But before I spend time building it, I want to figure out whether there would be interest for such a service.
The service would have two parts: a MPS plugin and a web server. The MPS plugin would provide special copy and paste actions.
The copy action would render a node as an image, post the image and the node as XML to the service and copy the URL to the clipboard so you can e-mail/Slack/Skype it to somebody.
The service would display the node as an image and provide means to get the underlying XML.
The paste action would read the URL from the clipboard, get the XML and paste it to MPS.
(Of course if you read this description and feel enthusiastic enough to build this over the next weekend, feel free :))
Would you use this service if it was public and anonymous? What about a private version (in cloud/on premises)?
Please sign in to leave a comment.
We have a closed development environment. If the functionality would still work with just the message over the messaging/email channel, that would be perfect for us.
Hmm, how about a paste service running inside MPS? Would work in closed networks but you'd have to keep your MPS open if you want your code to be accessible.
I did something similar once: https://modelshare.mendix.com/ Experience from that: being able to run this privately or cloud-wise but with visibility restricted to a specific group, turns out to be key. Public use is nice for the community and for educational purposes but you'll never see an uptick in using this service if you can't share stuff with direct colleagues and then usually an NDA of some sort applies.
Why not reuse github gists or gitlab snippets for that? Most companies have a local github or gitlab running.
We could put the xml into the text and post the image into the comments (so that the image will also only be accessible for people who have access to that snippet). The paste action would then need to be able to find out the snippet based on the image url. I'm unsure if that is doable.
Otherwise we could have image and xml two separate snippets and walk from one to the other with a naming convention.
I like this idea, I'll try it out. It's actually possible to have multiple files in one Github Gist (but not in a Gitlab snippet, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14844).