Why ofWorks? #41
Description
First of all, for the love of openFrameworks project
It started as a proof of concept of alternative way of building libs, and my feeling that was easier to start from scratch than fixing apothecary.
My motivation was using more modern tooling, programming world is much better now than 20 years ago.
So I made a fork to start experimenting with the libs that had different paths, and I've merged with all the latest of openFrameworks plus unmerged PR ideas I had for OF.
Applied the same principle to projectGenerator. Even as a maintainer there for some years I think there is a lot of unneded complexity there. ofGen was built from scratch and it doesn't use OF as a dependency, so it is a fast compile.
Between OF 12.0 and 12.1 release we spent some time without working libraries for most projects so I decided to work on this to have at least everything working on macOS for my ongoing projects.
Experimentally later I started to use more modular libraries build system, generating for more platforms and trying to make things work for all platforms seamlessy. Windows was the hard one for me, I don't use it day to day, it is more oriented for DLL usage, so I had to learn how to do things properly there.
My main motivation was writing ofLibs and ofGen as drop in replacements for OF itself.
Over time ofWorks self indicated as a place to keep improving and testing, like a bleeding edge OF, or a parallel timeline OF.
And decided it was time for others to also benefit of all love dedicated to its development.
ofWorks design
Commercial and Artistic work
Central workflow with reproduceable recipes, versioning, seamless deployment to other platforms, integration with CI (ongoing development)
Education
By having a more unified tooling and editor it is easy to use in different platforms with basically the same workflow
Art archival
One interest of art institutions now is how to deal with aging technology artworks
By having reproduceable recipes and a lean core it is easier to archive and use ofWorks projects as a time capsule to archive works of art