ASP.NET GUI Editor-Michael: Report #8

[Michael Hutchinson]

Hello again everyone!

Sorry for the lateness. A security update made my Ubuntu installation
unbootable(!) and it tool me a couple of days to get it fixed up. I
moved to Breezy, as I needed a newer libc6 than Hoary's, and using that
before may have contributed to the breakage.

Done this week
==============
* Basic page parsing and directive support.

Problems
========
* Blago's not yet got his Mozilla code into SVN, so I'm still waiting
for that before I can begin integration.

* Unfortunately there is no easy way to hook into Mono's page parsing
framework, especially the ControlBuilders, so I've reimplemented quite
a bit of it using ParseChildrenAttribute to tell me what to do. I
haven't had a reply from Gonzalo, so I'm doing the best way I can see
myself.

Plans for next week
===================
* Polish up the Page Parser. Fixes for Mono (I developed it on .NET2
Beta2) Add support for comments and code blocks.

* Mozilla editor integration!

* A simple interface to load custom controls so I can test out the
inherent support I've built in already

Regards,

Michael

[miguel de icaza]

* Unfortunately there is no easy way to hook into Mono's page parsing
framework, especially the ControlBuilders, so I've reimplemented quite
a bit of it using ParseChildrenAttribute to tell me what to do. I
haven't had a reply from Gonzalo, so I'm doing the best way I can see
myself.

I have asked Gonzalo to follow up with you.  What is your main issue in this area?  Whats the ideal outcome?

 miguel

[Florian Gross]

Michael Hutchinson wrote:

> Sorry for the lateness. A security update made my Ubuntu installation
> unbootable(!) and it tool me a couple of days to get it fixed up.

Yikes, had somewhat less serious trouble here. Installed an ext3 driver
on Windows and it would totally slow down the whole system. The task bar
would frequently freeze and not react to the mouse etc. -- pretty
confusing stuff when you are not even sure what causes it. Took me some
time to figure this one out...

[Michael Hutchinson]

Thanks.

I needed to parse a page into the internal structure I'm using. I
explained a lot in my email to Gonzalo; would you like me to forward it
to you? I wanted advice really on how to make the best use of the
framework's parser for compatibility etc.

The route I've now taken is to copy some of the framework's
parser/tokeniser classes, and leave them unmodified so that I can copy
over updated versions. I then have a parser that interfaces with them,
and uses a construct of my own similar to ASP.NET ControlBuilders to
build up the document structure. I had some trouble with
ParseChildrenAttribute not always being set, as Mono itself uses custom
ControlBuilders instead, so I've just last night filled in the gap by
using PersistenceModeAttribute and PersistChildrenAttribute as well.
They're actually hints for persistence rather than parsing, but this
now means if I can save a document, I should be able to open it :-)
I'll commit the updated version to SVN in a few hours after I've fixed
a few things.

The limitation with this approach is that it's not possible to perform
some of the custom parsing implemented in ControlBuilders.
Unfortunately they have very few external interfaces, and nothing you
can use to extract . I looked at implementing mcs classlib's
DesignTimeTemplateParser to be able to use that to parse controls, but
the parsing framework seems very "file->compile" oriented and I didn't
really want to go restructuring it. It would also give me much less
freedom in handling other tags like directives, code, databinding...

Not having custom ControlBuilders is not actually an issue until we
have support for custom designers, and the page persister uses
GetInnerPersistHtml, because at the moment I can parse everything I can
persist. I look forward to moving the target to .NET 2, as that exposes
an external BuildObject() method on ControlBuilders that I could
implement and use. So I'd just not worry about it till then.

Anyway, I need to add support for server-side comments, code blocks and
maybe databinding. But they're not critical, so first I'll crack on
with the Mozilla integration.

Michael

[miguel de icaza]

Summer developers,

    If you are interested let me know and send your submission.  I can help a bit with the writting if you want (not much as I managed to break my arm last week).

From:  Greg Wilson <gvwi...@cs.utoronto.ca> Reply-To:  summer-adm...@googlegroups.com To:  summer-adm...@googlegroups.com Subject:  re: Doctor Dobb's Journal (guidelines) Date:  Tue, 23 Aug 2005 16:15:13 -0400 (EDT)

Hi everyone, We have finally ironed out the details of running articles about SOC projects in "Doctor Dobbs Journal", and we'd like to invite you and your students to contribute articles based on your projects for upcoming issues.  We'd like each pair to write 400 words about the project itself, including a quick summary of its aims, the main technical issues involved, and what it delivered.  Screenshots and diagrams are welcome, though there's obviously a tradeoff between the amount of graphics and text. Students and mentors should also provide some basic biographical details---where you're from, what school you're at, etc.---and a headshot photo (although we can't guarantee the pictures will be used).  DDJ will run at least four articles each month in the print edition, starting in November (which goes to typesetting in mid-September).  All the articles will also go on-line; students and mentors will get t-shirts to go with those from SOC when articles appear, along with copies of the magazine. We think this would be great exposure for you, your project, and SOC. If you're interested, please put together a point-form outline of what you'd like to say (half a dozen points is enough), and let me know by sending mail to "ddj...@gmail.com".  Please use your organization and project name as the subject line, like this:    Subject: Python / Bitten to help keep things organized, and please let me know when you think you'd be able to have a first draft ready. Thanks, Greg Wilson Doctor Dobb's Journal / University of Toronto

[miguel de icaza]

Gentlemen,

    I noticed that Google's gmail is doing some pretty nice things with its HTML composer, it might even be using some of Mozilla's internals to do things like table editing.  Has this been researched?

I noticed the table behavior when I pasted some email from evolution here

[Blagovest Dachev]

Cool, I never new that it's an HTML editor as well. My first guess is that its
using Midas - Mozilla's rich text editor. I'll scrutinize it more. Anyway,
nothing that our ASP editor can't do :-)

Blago

[Blagovest Dachev]

Hello,

Yep, it's Mozilla's Midas. Midas is the inline editor, which could be invoked
on an iframe (and maybe other tags to make their content editable). It's
using the real editor under the hood, but provides next to nothing for
embedders. No, action listeners, observers, etc.

Blago

[miguel de icaza]

Hey,

Yep, it's Mozilla's Midas. Midas is the inline editor, which could be invoked
on an iframe (and maybe other tags to make their content editable). It's
using the real editor under the hood, but provides next to nothing for
embedders. No, action listeners, observers, etc.

Thanks for the explanation.

Good luck with the editor, I noticed the commits fly by today!

[Jb Evain]

I'm in.

Maybe we can wait to know if other students are willing to
participate. Miguel let me know if you're ok.

Jb

[Jeyasankar Kottalam]

Quoting Jb Evain <jbe...@gmail.com>:

>
> I'm in.
>
> Maybe we can wait to know if other students are willing to
> participate. Miguel let me know if you're ok.
>

I'm also in. I discussed it with Miguel off of the list, and I have
submitted my
proposal to Greg Wilson.

-Jey Kottalam

[Jb Evain]

I guess only one student per project is allowed ?

Jb

[miguel de icaza]

Hello,

    Is that on the guidelines?   I dod not think so, but I will check

[Jb Evain]

I can try anyway :)

Jb

[Jeyasankar Kottalam]

Quoting Jb Evain <jbe...@gmail.com>:

>
> I guess only one student per project is allowed ?
>
> Jb

When you say "project", do you mean mentoring organization? I think
that's very
unlikely.. no reason for them to restrict it to one article per mentoring
organization.

Either way, you should drop an email to Greg to clarify. I think they probably
mean one article per student project.

-Jey Kottalam

[Jb Evain]

The didn't mean anything, I was just guessing, wrong as it seems :)
I'm writing this mail as we talk.

Jb

On 8/24/05, Jeyasankar Kottalam <mo...@jey.kottalam.net> wrote:
>

[MDK]

Count me in, seems like a good way to attract developers. Since they
mention November as a first publishing date, I hope we can wait with
this till the end of SoC. It's only six days left, and I'd rather
focus on finishing some stuff now. Let me know, if you think this is a
problem.

--
Michał Dominik K.
michal...@gmail.com
www.mdk.org.pl