Hello. I'm an author of SymADE project (http://symade.tigris.org). Basically it's a development environment like IP (Intentional Programming - http://intentsoft.com) and MPS (Meta Programming System - http://jetbrains.com/mps). If you heard nothing about such IDEs, here's a short description. In SymADE/MPS/IP the program's code is not text, but (AST or CST) tree. These environments allow to create new meanings ('intentions', 'concepts'), like those we have in programming languages (like concepts of 'class', 'variable', 'expression', 'function' and so on), and then programs are written in these meanings/concepts. The IDE also allows to specify 'syntax' for these meanings, but it's not a textual syntax, but rather a way to render/display/edit these meanings. Using this 'syntax' the IDE creates a structured editor for the program. In this way you get a DSL (domain-specific language) or eDSL (embedded DSL, or an extension to existing language) fully integrated into IDE, with all those auto-completion, verification, background compilation, and refactoring support. So, you'll have something as expressional as XML, but with beauty 'syntax' and IDE integration.
My IDE (SymADE) is in alpha stage yet, but already powerful enough to deal with DSLs that need minimal compilation, which are used mainly for conficuration perposes. Like Ant. So, I have an idea to write the Ant IDE using SymADE. And here are my questions to Ant's community and developers. 1. What do you think about the idea of writing such Ant IDE? Creation of DSL support in SymADE will be very fast (maybe a week or two), but since the SymADE is itself in alpha stage, the IDE release may take a few months. 2. If you'll find it convenient enough - will you distribute it together with Ant? My primary interests are to make a full-featured usage example, and to attract developer's attention to the SymADE project. 3. Do you have 'syntax' (visual representation) preferences? You can use virtually any kind of rendering, with different fonts, colors, text and images layout, folding, etc. You, probably, did discussed alternative syntaxes for Ant (since XML is not the easiest to read and edit). 4. I have rather little knowledge about Ant's internals. Can you give me a reference to internal structure description and a full list of concepts used in Ant (tasks, conditions, filesets and so on). 5. Will I be able to retrieve constraints about attributes (like 'you can specify either FILE or DIR attribute, but not both'), and list of attributes (and their types) from tasks (.class files, from Ant API or somewhere else)? Or I will have to encode them manually for each task (concept)? Regards Maxim Kizub --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
