Dear Hoppers, In a lot of other IDE like tools you find a project-centric approach to developing something. Using a project is mostly enforced by the way that software works, for example Eclipse or Idea.
In Hop we implemented projects as part of a plugin because sometimes you just want to trim things down to the bare essentials. So essentially what this comes down to is that you can use projects and put all your work under a certain folder as per usual OR you can do your own thing and configure Hop just the way you like. Right now though it's not possible to not use a project once you've used one in the GUI. Brandon raised this issue in a JIRA case and on the chat and perhaps it was a misunderstanding but in any case we are faced with some options to reduce confusion: 1. Force the use of a project on a user. Don't even allow new files or metadata to be created without a project to work in. This is how most tools work but the downside is that we'd have to nag the user for the creation of a new project before anything can be done. 2. Keep things as the way they are but allow the user to disconnect from a project. Carify where metadata is stored in this scenario. We could simply add a new button in the toolbar to "disconnect" from a project which would simply clear the project combo box. 3. Option 1. but with automatic creation of a "Default" project. We can store that project somewhere in a standard location (configurable) like Eclipse does in ~/workspace/ or simply in the config folder next to the metadata (./config/projects/default) I honestly have no opinion on it so I thought I'd ask. It's not urgent but it warrants clarification since this confusion will continue to bubble up I think. Maybe you have another idea? Let us know. I'd be happy to make the changes to the codebase, those are likely quite limited. I also think this issue can be tied together with the shipment of standard samples packages with the Hop distribution. Perhaps if we have a Default project we could also have a "Samples" project. Cheers, Matt
