Launchpad
Those of us who have been programming for a while have all probably recognized, by now, a number of tasks we find ourselves repeating over and over again. It seems that you learn a technique or framework, get comfortable with it, and then for the rest of your life you spend the first 30 minutes of every project setting it up.
For many purposes, we just reuse classes that we’ve written or that have been written for us. For more complex scenarios, we’ve gone down the dark road of holding onto templates. In either case, we all look for ways to jump into development as quickly as possible without having to constantly repeat ourselves.
This is what Launchpad is about. Launchpad is a template management application designed to make dealing with boilerplate code easier so you can get down some real development.
Launchpad has a number of advantages over your existing templating system:
- Your templates are centralized and managed by the application. Once you add a template to Launchpad, you don’t have to worry about where it lives on your filesystem.
- Launchpad has a limited ability to modify the contents of your template files so that you don’t have to modify package names and other values yourself.
- Templates in Launchpad are easy to write, and they’ll be getting more powerful in the future.
Using Launchpad is simple:
- Name your package
- Select a location
- Select a plugin
- Generate!
Launchpad comes packaged with a plugin for the PureMVC Framework in Flash, but more are coming in the future, and writing your own plugins is incredibly easy. Plugins are stored in the .zip file format so you don’t need any unusual software to get started. A full guide will be coming soon, but in the meantime if you just inspect the contents of the included plugin it should be pretty clear how things are structured.
You can get started using Launchpad by using the installer below. Comments, bug reports, and feature requests are all welcome and appreciated.