LiveCode Forums.

Hey folks, I have an idea for when you get around to working on the newer engine and thus a newer stack format and that is, what if we could load a stack into the memory using a sequence of bytes. Now the grounds for this idea are that I believe the way a stack works is that it is effectively a data structure that is serialized to disk, I've worked with serialization in Java for University and I think this would be a great addition.

If for example, I am going to store all the files I have for a stack into a ZIP archive and have just the ZIP and the built executable on the users hard drive, it would be great if I could just read in a stack from the ZIP (Without extracting to a temporary location) and store the binary data in a variable and then pass this to the engine to be constructed into the in memory version of the stack, effectively, something akin to this:
The engine would then take the data and reconstruct the stack in the memory as if it had just read it in as a normal file. I think people would benefit from this, because in the example above, a ZIP file could keep the disk space occupied down if someone built a really big LiveCode app, personally I would use this sort of thing as virtual file system for Xenon, it would give me the opportunity to do things like file and folder ACLs.

try it, you might be pleasantly surprised by:

Hmm, I noticed Go To works, but not Put The Short Name Of Stack, which is what I tend to use to load stacks into the memory, so half way there.

can't you do some go invisible, close, set the visible to true trickery to get what you want?

Hmm, i could do something like that, its just I believe the idea that the lower the number of lines of code, the better an application will run. But I've got something like this:
Monte do you think you could test something like this out for me please, I'm pretty much busy with people stuff all day and won't have any access to LC or my main rig.

Thanks.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got a chance to have a look but it doesn't work, it basically yields "create: no file name supplied" I know I can pull a list of stacks and just compare the difference between the two but I think it would be nicer if the engine had the functionality built in.