Hi folks, I'm fairly new to Laszlo, and don't like the (lack of) options for developing OL apps. I've looked at several tools to see how they can enable the development of OL apps (XML editors such as Oxygen and XmlBuddy, and IDEs such as Emacs, NetBeans, and XCode). None of these tools seemed to me to offer much assistance. Given the choice of working with poor IDE support in Laszlo or using Flex, I decided to write my own IDE.
The IDE will be cross-platform, and includes 1) a LZX source XML editor with outlining, automatic indentation and colorization, context-sensitive element/attribute suggestions, and pre-compilation validation warnings 2) a visual layout builder displaying the component relationships without having to compile to SWF, with drag and drop layout, and a property inspector for each component 3) an in-built web-browser to display the compiled-rendered application 4) VCS integration Parts 1 and 2 are complete. Part 3 at the moment is only a wireframe representation of the layout, and is not editable. No work has started on part 4. However, according to this bug-report [http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-2300] the official OL DTD has been out of date for at least 18 months (it represents Laszlo at version 2.1.2). This is going to limit the usefulness of the IDE, since probably a significant number of elements are going to fail validation within the IDE and are not going to be found as options during code-completion. In fact, since it is the DTD that drives the property palettes, if an element is not listed in the DTD there will not be a property inspector for it. I don't know if voting for OL bugs has any effect, but I know of other organizations with open bug-reporting who do respond to votes on bugs. If you would like to see a new IDE for OL, please vote for the above bug. Indeed, I'm not alone in needing this updated DTD: several people have posted in the forum asking for an updated DTD (http://forum.openlaszlo.org/showthread.php?p=29210#post29210 and http://forum.openlaszlo.org/showthread.php?p=29506). Apologies if this is the wrong forum in which to raise something like this. Also, if there is already work underway on updating the DTD, then my apologies for complaining about the currently outdated DTD. Also, I sent this message via nabble.com, and inadvertendly sent an earlier version. Luckily, since I hadn't yet subscribed to the list it looks like that message did not appear. My apologies if it does subsequently appear - I didn't mean to spam the list on this issue. Bernard -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/new-visual-IDE-tf4821075.html#a13792659 Sent from the OpenLaszlo - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
