A couple of comments: At the moment there is certainly no one-stop-shop IDE for SVG development. It may be conceptually useful, then, to separate development out into several tasks. This way, you can choose which tool is most appropriate for any given task. I would propose that SVG development may be separated at least into:
A. Graphical Design B. Client-Side Scripting - If you're targeting the browser environment, you will almost certainly be required to write all of your UI logic in JavaScript. This may involve leveraging certain AJAX toolkits. C. Server-Side Programming - In PHP, Ruby, Python. There may be a database component involved as well. D. Client-Side Debugging E. Server-Side Debugging For A, the best free tool, in my opinion, is Inkscape. If need to hand-tune your XML after saving your work from Inkscape, then you either need a plain text or specialized XML editor. Vim has always been enough for me. oXygen is probably going to be overkill for most things. For B, client-side scripting, once again, I prefer Vim and command-line tools, but I started with Aptana, and it is definitely the most impressive, complete environment at the moment for writing serious applications in JavaScript. It may be the case that Eclipse is holding Aptana back from being very good at working with SVG. It was my understanding that, at the moment, Eclipse was poorly-suited for working with SVG, because there is no SVG renderer that integrates with SWT (Batik uses Java2D). On the other hand, SWT does have a Gecko renderer integrated into it, so I wonder if it might not be worth another look to see what would happen if you were to save a compound XHTML-SVG document with the SVG content inlined inside, and open it up in Eclipse's Gecko-based HTML previewer. If you make sure it has a .xhtml extension, then the MIME type should no longer give you any trouble, and it would be interesting to see if it would actually render. For D, debugging, I've had great success with Firebug, but only for compound XHTML-SVG documents. For plain old SVG documents, Firebug doesn't work at all, unfortunately. In general, this hasn't been a limitation, because if you're going to leverage most AJAX toolkits, you need the HTML context (this has at least been true for mootools and dojo, in my experience, and seems to be true for prototype as well, as I think I saw noted in some of the source code of the Lively Kernel). I have also had success with Opera Dragonfly on compound documents, but have not tested it on regular SVG documents. Aptana has a debugger, but it is literally just using Firebug on the backend (it actually needs to open up Firefox to debug), and is less featurful than simply using Firebug (no command-line in Eclipse). For C and E, take your pick of environments... It's interesting to note that Aptana seems to be buying up all of the good Eclipse-based environments for dynamic languages, including RadRails, and, recently, Pydev, my favorite environment for Python development. Now if it would just integrate them in a meaningful way, and be able to provide me with a Gecko-based preview of the results, all right in the Eclipse environment, then that would really be something.... Jake On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:12 PM, ddailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi folks, > > I've been trying, rather unsystematically, to explore various options for > SVG editing/authoring. > > See http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/IG/wiki/Authoring_tools_and_editors for a > list of things known or suspected of being relevant to the task (both > software packages and features relevant to the evaluation). The ideal tool > is, of course, free, easy to learn and use, powerful, standards compliant, > extensible, cross-platform etc. etc. > > Thus far I've determined that > KompoZer (a lovely little package originating with Daniel Glazman and > colleagues) does not yet support SVG > > I'm interested in confirmation or denial of my experiments that suggest > that: > > [all statements below involve huge disclaimers] > 1. Aptana Studio (associated with the Open Ajax Alliance) does not yet > support SVG. I installed a recent version and it seems to refuse to > recognize the file type or to display any graphics. I agree with Jake that > Aptana Studio is well worth paying attention to. > 2. Nvu (from which KompoZer is descended) also does not support SVG > 3. PsPad (despite having a plugin that is ostensibly for SVG) does not > support SVG > 4. Safari/webkit Web Inspector is rather buggy for SVG in the Windows > environment and seems not to support SVG editing and saving > 5. Eclipse has a Batik related SVG viewer (Cameron what do you use?). > Eclipse seems a bit like an elephant gun. > 6. Firebug seems to be more of a debugging environment than an authoring > environment. (For example I can't seem to create a new blank page in it). > 7. WebDwarf seems not to have a direct coding mode in which you can directly > modify source code. > 8. oXygen is huge, and hence, rather overwhelming, but seems to have good > SVG support. > > the last claim I understand to be false but I cannot prove it false: > 9. HTML-Kit has no way to preview SVG files > [all statements above involve huge disclaimers] > > I would be quite happy to be set straight about any of the above > observations. In some cases I spent less than an hour fiddling with the > package to see if I could get it to play futbol so I well may have missed > something obvious to the enthusiasts. > > Can anyone comment first-hand on experiences with > Dragonfly (I've played with it a bit but haven't figured it out well enough > to be able to modify code yet) > notepad++, > textpad, > Seamonkey > or Safari/webkit web inspector for Mac? > > I'm likely to make pointers to any comments people leave on this subject, so > smile for the camera! Again if there are other programs that belong on the > list, I'd like to know about them as well. Am interested in gathering > informed reviews of any or all of these. > > cheers, > David > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > ------------------------------------ ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ----Yahoo! 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