2002 • April • 26

Hot patching, Radio UserLand, and not Microsoft

When I talk about Radio and my love/hate with it, this is one of the things I absolutely positively adore, fawn over, and plan to mimic in as many of my projects as I can where I can. Back when the Mozilla source code was first released, and I happened to be at a Q&A with some Netscape guys, this was the #1 feature I pestered them to spend time looking into.

John Robb of UserLand points it out, in relation to .NET:

[Alchin said, "]The hot patching technology will not find its way into the upcoming .Net Server family, but we have made progress on reducing reboots.["]

Radio already does this.

Yes, yes it does, and this is dead sexy. I love that the system is put together in such a way that this is possible. My monitoring of the Radio.root Updates RSS feed reminds me daily of where my $40/year is going.

Now, can we have Instant Outlines do this? :) Heehee.

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Archived Comments

Morbus Iff

2002-04-26T19:16:11

Funny you should mention this just now. That's where I've been heading with AmphetaDesk. The new code base I've designed, along with a wrapper binary, should allow me to do hotpatching relatively soon. As a matter of fact, this very day I was talking about creating an App::OnlineUpdate module in perl.
l.m.orchard

2002-04-27T12:40:10

Sweet! I was just playing with some class reloading in Python, but I've done that in Perl before, too. One thing I really like about Radio's updates is that since they have a mini-OS runnin on your machine anyway, they can push whole new apps down to you if you want them. Fix bugs without you needing to download anything, close security holes, etc. Been wondering what you've been up to with Ampheta :)