Newbie question about using spark productively

[Anirudh]

Hi,

I've been using Spark mixed in with my MVC2 views for a week now. I
would really appreciate it if you can share any productivity advice
you have gained. I specifically have a couple of small questions
(Please note I'm running Spark with Mono on Linux, it works
surprisingly well though):

1. I don't use Visual studio. When I change something in Spark, I need
to recompile my solution and restart the server. Is this the standard
scenario? On the contrary, if I make any modifications in my WebForms
views, I don't need to do any such thing. It becomes a pain when I am
editing some embedded javascript or trying to fix up something with
CSS. I would really like to have a "Debug" mode where the view is
recompiled every time a page is requested.

2. I found that the error display is rather lacking. I can barely make
out much from the stacktrace that comes up on the screen. Can you give
any pointers on how to make this experience better? I remember django
having some functionality where one could have logs on the server
which would be displayed on the client in case some settings were
turned on.

3. Is there any external tool which verifies the validity of spark
templates (or recompiles them which would solve problem number 1 for
me)? If I can run foo.exe /path/to/view.spark, and be able to see any
potential errors, that would be great!

Thanks,
Anirudh

[Rob G]

Hi Anirudh,

To my knowledge you shouldn't have to recompile every time you change a spark file, but I haven't tried out the bits on Mono in a long time - glad to hear it's working though.

The tooling is definitely something that can be improved overall and it's something I'm spending as much time as I can on. Of course, Visual Studio is the primary use case for this and so most effort going there at first. I'm sure that other platforms will be able to take advantage of some of the work done in that area too tho since the parsers don't really take a platform specific dependency. I think most of the work is going to go into the higher demand areas, so getting interest in Spark up on Mono would be a good way to attract development effort.

Good luck with it,

Regards,

Rob

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[Anirudh]

HI Rob,

Thanks for confirming that the recompilation isn't necessary. I will
go through the examples and make sure everything is working fine. The
only thing I can think about is if you guys are using some kind of a
Managed File watcher extension which is incompatible with Mono, then
it can be fixed on either end.

As for anyone considering deploying Spark on Linux, I think the
overall experience has been great. We had some minor glitches as far
as the path separator goes (/ or \). Except that, Spark seems to be a
very promising solution

Thanks,
Anirudh

--
Senior undergraduate student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
http://anirudhsanjeev.org