Pibbage

Inspiration

We were inspired to do something similar to Jekyll to help users familiar with Markdown simplify their lives instead of learning HTML. The name "Pibbage" was also a mash-up of Pi and the last name of Charles Babbage. Pi came from our github organisation name 31445, which is close to 3.1416, and Babbage played a part in the development of the language Ada.

What it does

At the moment, it takes a limited form of markdown as input, and outputs some HTML. There are also some templates around, but we didn't get around to connecting them.

How we built it

With Ada and HTML! (We didn't manage to connect Ada to HTML.) We did in Javascript and we tried to convert it to Ada. For HTML and Ada, we learnt it from scratch!

Challenges we ran into

The scarcity of documentation on various Ada libraries and functions. Also, we have no idea how to use GNAT. Sockets is supposed to work, but it is being really strange (see the network branch).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it to reply to a message! (Although the message is cut in half and we don't know why) We actually wrote something in Ada! It has a few places that could be improved upon, but it is quite a friendly language if you find the documentation you are looking for. We managed to create something in HTML!

What we learned

Learning to program sockets is hard. Learning to program sockets in Ada, a language we started learning in earnest yesterday is pretty close to impossible. We also learnt HTML from scratch!

What's next for Pibbage

The long term plan includes connecting the templates to the converter, adding some extra functionality, and maybe adding some limited server-side scripting.