Very cool. Especially given the development trajectory of Ace to become the "eclipse" of web IDEs there will be a lot of interesting possibilities as we could develop our own mediaWiki centric plugins for the platform.
I can't help but think about where this is ideally headed ;) A gitorius type system for easy branching with mediaWiki.org code review style tools, with in browser editing. With seemless workflows for going from per user developing and testing on the live site, to commits to your personal repository, to being reviewed and tested by other developers, to being enabled by interested users, to being enabled by default if so desired. A lot of these workflows could be prototyped without many complicated infrastructure improvements. Since this basic process is already happening in a round about way ... ( sometimes in a round about broken way ) A "developer gadget" could include a simple system for switching between local checkout of the scripts and support "pushing" a particular local copy "live" or in the case of the online Ace editor, bootstrapping a particular page with the state of your script ( using the draft extension concept ) so we don't have to save every edit when you want to test your code. We could specify a path structure within our existing svn to keep in sync with all gadgets and site scripts, then have our 'developer gadget' understand that path structure so you could seamlessly switch between the local and live gadget. ( I was manually doing something similar in my gadget development ). This could also help encourage gadget centralisation. We could then also link into the code review system for every site script and gadget with one click import of a particular version of the script ( ideally once the script has been seen by other developers ). Svn commits would not nessisarally be automatically be pushed to the wiki but edits to the wiki page would always be pushed to the svn. Or maybe a sign off in code review results in the push from svn to wiki, but would not want to slow down fixes getting pushed out. We would have to see what workflows work best for the community. mmm ... this would would probably work better with git :P ... but certainly is not a show stopper to experimentation in improving these workflows. peace, --michael On 04/12/2011 07:40 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: > While pondering some directions for rapid prototyping of new UI stuff, I > found myself lamenting the difficulty of editing JS and CSS code for > user/site scripts and gadgets: > > * lots of little things to separately click and edit for gadgets > * no syntax highlighting in the edit box > * no indication of obvious syntax errors, leading to frequent edit->preview > cycles (especially if you have to turn the gadget back off to edit > successfully!) > * no automatic indentation! > * can't use the tab key > > Naturally, I thought it might be wise to start doing something about it. > I've made a small gadget script which hooks into editing of JS and CSS > pages, and embeds the ACE code editor (http://ace.ajax.org -- a component of > the Cloud9 IDE, formerly Skywriter formerly Mozilla Bespin). This doesn't > fix the usability issues in Special:Gadgets, but it's a heck of a lot more > pleasant to edit the gadget's JS and CSS once you get there. :) > > The gadget is available on www.mediawiki.org on the 'Gadgets' tab of > preferences. Note that I'm currently loading the ACE JavaScript from > toolserver.org, so you may see a mixed-mode content warning if you're > editing via secure.wikimedia.org. (Probably an easy fix.) > > Go try it out! http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-CodeEditor.js > > IE 8 kind of explodes and I haven't had a chance to test IE9 yet, but it > seems pretty consistently nice on current Firefox and Chrome and (barring > some cut-n-paste troubles) Opera. > > I'd really love to be able to use more content-specific editing tools like > this, and using Gadgets is a good way to make this sort of tool available > for testing in a real environment -- especially once we devise some ways to > share gadgets across all sites more easily. I'll be similarly Gadget-izing > the SVG-Edit widget that I've previously done as an extension so folks can > play with it while it's still experimental, but we'll want to integrate them > better as time goes on. > > -- brion > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
