OK. Been thinking things through, and here's my plan for this beast.
**Will be written in Java, allowing the program to run on many platforms without rewriting.
**Will use the Eclipse Project's Standard Widgets Toolkit (http://www.eclipse.org/swt/) instead of Swing for GUI widgets. I fully understand that this means that we'll lose some cross-platform compatibillity. I'm OK with that. Swing is a huge, slow, memory-munching beast -- that's the tradeoff you have to deal with when you don't rely on the operating system to draw most of your widgets as SWT does. We'll still be able to run the IDE on Windows and Mac OSX as well as any Unixish system that can run Motif or GTK. (The Eclipse IDE, which uses SWT, is currently available in Windows, Linux/Motif, Linux/GTK, Solaris/Motif, AIX/Motif, HPUX/Motif, and Mac OSX flavors, so I am confident that we'll be covered on all of the major platforms.)
**Will use the Mozilla Foundation's JRex project (http://jrex.mozdev.org/). JRex is a Java wrapper for the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE). The use of JRex will allow us to embed a browser within the IDE. The embedded browser will be used to preview pages, and will also be used to do WYSIWYG editing.
I'm using OSCOM's Kupu for another project (a website that requires online editing). I'm planning on taking some chunks of the Javascript code out of Kupu and using them as a base for the editor in the IDE. Now here's the cool thing: it appears that you can load an HTML document and manipulate it using JRex's DOM functionality. So, this part should be relatively simple.
**Will speak to the Midgard server using SOAP, which means I need to upgrade my server to 1.6.0. :P
**Will be called MidGuiIDE. Pronounced "Mid-Guide." I'm willing to take suggestions for other names but quite frankly, I think I came up with a good one. ;)
Thoughts, suggestions, comments, rants, flames welcome. My long-term goal is to make this an official Midgard project, so I want community input.
Happy New Year, **SJS
-- JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids.
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