For a many months, I've considered what an advanced, easy-to-use development
environment for qooxdoo applications would look like. A few weeks ago, just
before he published it as a contrib, Dan Hummon demonstrated to me his
Tartan Blueprint Designer, and he and I discussed some of the ideas I've
been considering. Although there is overlap, I think his project and what I
have in mind are towards somewhat different purposes. Dan stated, "I do want
to stress that, I'm envisioning the designer as a form designer; not as a
full application designer." What I have in mind, on the other hand, is an
application designer that also handles communication with a server. I
suspect that at some point, the two may merge, but having two parallel
development paths right now also allows experimenting with different
implementations.
Until recently, I've had no time to even begin a project of this scope. To
get it to the point I dream of will be a huge project. Since I'm back in
grad school now, though, I have decided to do a Phase I of this as my term
project for my Human Computer Interaction course.
I'm thinking of a (partial) feature list akin to this, implemented in in
various phases:
- View "running" qooxdoo application as it's being built, allowing for
incremental development
- Show dynamically-generated qooxdoo source code (nicely color coded and
formatted, of course)
- Save work in progress, and come back later to edit further
- Edit properties and events, with API documentation available upon
request or via pop-ups similar to what's done in NetBeans
- Allow for addition of code to provide event handlers and special
processing... with the ability for the additional code to be "attached" to
an object placed during the design, allowing for moving objects around and
retaining their associated added code
- Easy use of remote procedure calls. Possibly, even the backend stubs
could be automatically created
- Form processing
- Subclass creation and easy re-use
- Pluggable architecture, allowing for contribs or user-provided classes
to be easily added and used just like native classes
- Maybe, just maybe, I could even do on-the-fly parsing and flag errors
in the user-provided code, as is done in formal IDEs
- ...
Clearly, this is no small project. :-) My plan is to make a start on this
for my term project, and before doing so, I'd like to solicit comments and
suggestions from my target audience: all of you qooxdoo application
developers!
1. What do you find to be your most time-consuming or tedious tasks while
developing qooxdoo applications?
2. If you could have a tool to handle various aspects of your qooxdoo
application development, what aspects would those be, and what would you
hope the tool would do for you?
3. What is your current qooxdoo application development environment, and
in it, what features do you find lacking and what features are critical to
you?
4. Please add any additional comments or suggestions
These questions are fairly broad and general, but whatever topic(s) you
choose to answer them with, please try to answer as concisely as possible,
and to each individual question. Respond on this mailing list so discussion
of features can ensue. Please keep the message subject intact: *qooxdoo
"IDE" -- Request for Comments*, which will make it much easier to track the
discussion.
Thanks!
Derrell
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