Resources
This website is dedicated to building a community around these ideas and will be under continual construction and advancement. Right now, we are just at the beginning and are focused on getting the basic concepts captured in a series of articles, which is absolutely the best place to started.
There is also a very pre-alpha tool available called Projection® which is available to experiment with. I think it is more worth the effort to learn to do the techniques manually at this point, but for early adopters who like pain, there ya’ go.
After the first request, I will put up a pdf manual, but am focused on pushing the articles along as fast as I can first.
Additionally, there is the full text from a book I wrote about four years ago on the topic posted here. It is a bit dated at this point, but has some valuable insights into advanced patterns and code mechanisms which we will eventually catch up to in the articles. It is a mostly accurate preview of what is to come, but the level of effort to work with the advanced techniques is probably not a good place to start your exploration of Contextual Programming.
The Future
In the immediate future more articles will be posted, about one every two weeks, that will go through basic patterns of software design for the most common UI + protocol related scenarios. For instance, a basic pattern for user login has already been posted here. There will be two dimensions to the advancement of the articles. First, just new and different problems solved using Contextual Programming patterns will be posted. Secondly, each pattern will be solved in a number of different languages.
I will also be factoring out the patterns into a standardized feature on this site when a significant body of work has accumulated.
This is where you come in. If you would like to participate in this effort, make contributions, and get the bragging rights as to being the first developer to solve a particular problem using Contextual Programming or to port a known solution to a new language, by all means get in touch.
I am also building communities on Facebook, Twitter (though I haven’t really used it yet) and especially at Meetup.com. If you are in the Seattle area, please join us for our monthly meetings. If you are remote, get in touch and lets explore how to get a meeting started in your area.
There is much more to come and I hope you will join us in exploring this brand new world of programming.
Mark Truluck