On Mar 20, 2007, at 1:39 PM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:

> Documentation is lightyears out of date. Hope you find it still  
> impressive.

Thank you Gerd!

I'm finishing up a translator from one language used to write trading  
systems into another. Hopefully, I'll be able to add more languages  
as time goes buy but for now I was trying to figure out whether to  
deliver a .NET GUI in F#, a command-line app or a command-line app  
with a built-in web server.

A plain command-line app is not very friendly to Windows users.  
There's not much to the GUI either: just enough to capture a block of  
text or open a file and to show another block of text.

I do foresee a need for a lot of help text to document the quirks of  
translation and I don't look forward to creating Windows help files.  
There's also a possibility that people may want to pay a few bucks  
per translation rather than pay a few hundred bucks upfront for the app.

With that in mind, the best option seems to be a command-line app  
with an embedded web server. There's no installation required and you  
can just unzip the package, run the app and point your web server to  
a port. The help files then are just plain html and css and live in  
the same directory as the app itself.

What do you think?

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