Translator coding in 5.0: Life without Scaffold?

[Sebastian Karcher]

Hi,

with the 5.0 release without the FF version, I'm wondering if you have
given any thought about translator development in that environment?

I assume that Scaffold is out. I see three main ways in which it is
currently crucial for translator development and I'm wondering what we
can do about those, in descending order of importance:

1. Testing without restart. This is technically a Firefox add-on, not a
scaffold feature, but anyway -- in connector mode (unless I'm
misunderstanding) I'd have to restart the browser every time for
translator changes to be loaded and testable. That'd slow things down a lot.

2. Test building and update. This one is pretty self-explanatory: how
are we going to construct the -test JSON for translators?

3. IDE with quick testing function and built-in logging. This is
obviously not strictly necessary -- we could just test things in the
browser with an open console or so -- but it's still really nice to have
the dedicate IDE, no message clutter, no need to delete items saved to
Zotero, etc.


Any thoughts on that would be very welcome; I'm a bit nervous about what
translator maintenance would entail with the status quo minus Scaffold.

Thanks,

Sebastian

[Philipp Zumstein]

Three months ago I asked a similar question on GitHub: https://github.com/zotero/scaffold/issues/34 . Certainly, I share your concerns and I always think that the one-click-solution of Zotero for a broad variety of websites is one of its key features, which is technically backuped by the Zotero translators. Thus, it might be crucial to have good tools for maintaning them and add new ones.

Additional to your list: I think also that entering metadata of translators is easier to do with Scaffold and will make them appear in a standardized form. Moreover, one can test the target regexp, easy handling of translators using the framework with automatically updating the FW code when opening the file etc.

The best solution would be IMO to update Scaffold to the new Zotero 5.0 code (and any new developments). But I don't know if this is possible and how much work this would mean.

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[Dan Stillman]

I've updated [1] Scaffold to work with Zotero 5.0, which (shhh) for the moment can still be run as a source install in Firefox [2].

I haven't yet pushed this version, and until we break translator compatibility with 4.0 it might be easier just to run Zotero 4.0 in a separate profile with the old Scaffold installed and add-on updates disabled, in which case it's just as easy to run this from source as well.

For a better solution, I think we could pretty easily get Scaffold working in Standalone, mostly just by adding a <browser> or <iframe> to the right-hand column and making the "Active Tab URL" textbox load a URL into it. I've created an issue for that [3]. If anyone wants to work on it, they're welcome to — I probably won't have a chance for a little while.

[1] https://github.com/zotero/scaffold/commit/df467621397cfbc0c0a797fc8946571673b95751
[2] https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/source_code#running_git_installations
[3] https://github.com/zotero/scaffold/issues/36