XUL IDE
Daniel Kirsch
This question was asked (and individually answered) in a couple of
discussions at the moz dev day in Paris, on IRC and some blog posts.
We wanted to start a thread about that here so I'm going to start it.
And while we are talking about it, Mark Finkle is working on XULExplorer
0.5 and the current progress[1] and the future plans[2] have a lot of
what people want to see in the IDE project.
Daniel
[1] http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2007/06/xul-explorer-04-finally/
[2] http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL_Explorer:Planning
twentyafterfour
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385977
What do we need to do to stabilize the interface for the sidebar? I'm
working on an extension for XULExplorer and I would like to add a
sidebar with my extension. I have done this by adding a sidebar
selector menu-button to the toolbar but a nice "accordion" control
would be much better....
Daniel Kirsch
> What do we need to do to stabilize the interface for the sidebar?
If we want to use such an "accordion" control (i called it "catalog"), I
suggest creating a "View" prototype and a "Sidebar" singleton. If you
want to add a new view, eg a DOM view, you create a "View" instance and
add that to the Sidebar object. The Sidebar object than implicitly
creates a new catalog category representing that view.
I could implement all that, but it's currently a bit circumstantial and
painful for me to contribute to the project by using bugzilla, not
having the latest trunk and not beeing on the spot to share ideas and
code more easily and directly.
Daniel
twentyafterfour
contributing via bugzilla. I hope that some of this gets implemented
in the near future, I'm willing to help implement but my MVC
Architecture is likely to be less than optimal. I will play with your
patch when I have time to experiment.
Nickolay Ponomarev
> I could implement all that, but it's currently a bit circumstantial and
> painful for me to contribute to the project by using bugzilla, not
> having the latest trunk and not beeing on the spot to share ideas and
> code more easily and directly.
>
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL_Explorer#Contributing
Nickolay
Alex Vincent
> twentyafterfour wrote:
> I could implement all that, but it's currently a bit circumstantial and
> painful for me to contribute to the project by using bugzilla, not
> having the latest trunk and not beeing on the spot to share ideas and
> code more easily and directly.
>
> Daniel
I specifically make a point (now) of doing Verbosio on the latest 1.9
milestone (right now I'm forced to build it, but oh well). It saves me
time on updating / rebuilding, and for the first two to three weeks
doesn't diverge enough from trunk to worry about it. 1.9a6 is coming,
and would probably be good enough.
Daniel Kirsch
> Hmm, I thought the latest code for XUL Explorer was in SVN. Is it not
> the case?
Well, I'm not sure about that. The version I checked out recently seems
to be older than the 0.4 release and didn't worked. Some files were not
present. So I used the 0.4 release code and added my stuff there.
Daniel
Paul....@gmail.com
Souds good for me. I work from the subversion repository, and there's
not problem.
mark....@gmail.com
While I certainly like the accordion control, I don't know if its the
best choice for the sidebar in XUL Explorer. In situations where
sidebars can be added by extensions, we could end up with too much
real estate taken up by the accordion panels.
Also, I would like to see the accordion work more like Firefox
sidebars - extensions can overlay new sidebars (or accordion pages)
without the need to complicated MVC components or registration.
Ideally, the accordion would just use <page> like sidebar to build its
content.
mark....@gmail.com
Contributing using bugzilla is the norm for mozilla. Its btter if you
attach patches instead of full zips.
mark....@gmail.com
SVN should be the same or newer than any release. Let me know what
kind of differences you see.
I just updated the SVN trunk again.
twentyafterfour
it's the ultimate extension that I can't live without(tm)...
I like the way it allows you to activate your sidebars by using either
a dedicated toolbar or a single button-menu which mirrors the view-
>sidebar submenu. I have created an extension to XULExplorer that
implements the button-menu feature but it's not very extensible the
way I have done it. I can post my extension if anyone is interested in
evaluating or perhaps improving on it....
Daniel Kirsch
> In situations where
> sidebars can be added by extensions, we could end up with too much
> real estate taken up by the accordion panels.
We use that control for referencing different folders on the file
system. When opening one element, the folder's content will be shown in
thumbnails to easily drag a file onto our application.
To avoid wasting all the space by control buttons we can hide each
element and show a list and menu of all hidden elements to show hidden
elements again and easily manage the visible items.
> Ideally, the accordion would just use <page> like sidebar to build its
> content.
<page> is allready used however the file containing the actual sidebar
can use the page element of course.
Maybe <sidebarpage> ?
I like the idea that twentyafterfour brought in to show it like the "all
in one sidebar" extension is doing it
Maybe the control should be named "sidebar" with different "type"
attributes resulting in different presentations:
<sidebar type="accordion" />
<sidebar type="toolbar" />
<sidebar type="menu" />
Each <sidebarpage> element in the sidebar will than hold it's own
content where a <sidebarpage> can either have content itself or
references a file by it's src attribute.
Alternatively the control might be named
<sidebars>
or
<sidebarbox>
and each element might than be named
<sidebar>
I personally like
<sidebars>
<sidebar />
<sidebar />
</sidebars>
which is intuitive, pretty easy to remember and to use.
Daniel
Daniel Kirsch
> Contributing using bugzilla is the norm for mozilla. Its btter if you
> attach patches instead of full zips.
How to attach a new subfolder with 5 new files and changes in two
allready existing files?
Daniel
Benjamin Smedberg
you "svn add" the directory and files and then diff.
--BDS
Daniel Kirsch
> Daniel Kirsch wrote:
>> How to attach a new subfolder with 5 new files and changes in two
>> allready existing files?
>
> you "svn add" the directory and files and then diff.
Sorry, I'm totally new to this. Adding the files and getting the diff
for allready existing files works fine, but what about new files and
folders? Just attach them one by one to the bug? And what about the
diff? Shall I copy the diff into a comment? And what do you need from
the diff? (I'm using tortoise and winmerge)
Daniel
Benjamin Smedberg
Once you have "svn add"ed the new directory and new files, calling "svn
diff" should automatically include those files in the diff.
--BDS
Daniel Kirsch
> Once you have "svn add"ed the new directory and new files, calling "svn
> diff" should automatically include those files in the diff.
This looks like a command line on linux which doesn't work using
tortoiseSVN on winXP. Or at least I cannot find a way to get that working.
Daniel
Daniel Kirsch
> This looks like a command line on linux which doesn't work using
> tortoiseSVN on winXP. Or at least I cannot find a way to get that working.
Well... that's the kind of difficulties I mentioned before which makes
contributing not really funny and takes a lot of time.
twentyafterfour
I think tortoiseSVN has a way to generate a diff without using a
command line. And, even if it doesn't, Windows has a command prompt,
even if it is a bit annoying.
twentyafterfour
I don't think that we need to hard-code a type attribute in order to
specify the sidebar arrangement/style. I can think of several popular
IDEs which adapt different types of UI based on user preferences.
Xcode and KDevelop are two that come to mind immediately.
The Firefox sidebar is essentially just providing an IFrame and each
sidebar extension is just a document that gets loaded into that frame.
There are advantages and disadvantages to that but it might be worth
considering whether we want to have an arbitrary number of extensions
merged directly into the main XUL Document as apposed to having them
in a frame with only one loaded at any given time.
On Jul 3, 2:45 pm, Daniel Kirsch <Iwillnotread_dan...@gmx.de> wrote:
> mark.fin...@gmail.com schrieb:
Daniel Kirsch
> I don't think that we need to hard-code a type attribute in order to
> specify the sidebar arrangement/style.
Actually the type could be changed by the user at runtime and saved
using "persist". So I think that's exactly what you described for other
IDEs.
> The Firefox sidebar is essentially just providing an IFrame and each
> sidebar extension is just a document that gets loaded into that frame.
Yes, that should be the usual case - especially for larger and
extendable projects. However it might also be possible to just place
elements into a <sidebar> element. This would make the sidebar element
much more usable.
Daniel
Daniel Kirsch
> I think tortoiseSVN has a way to generate a diff without using a
> command line.
Yes, I can right click on a file and select diff. This will show me
either the build in merging tool or winMerge (depending on settings).
While this works fine, I don't what to do then. Should I manually copy
the differences into a bugreport and add the +/- marks in front of each
line? I think there must be an option to save the diff result, but I
cannot find that.
> And, even if it doesn't, Windows has a command prompt,
> even if it is a bit annoying.
Of course, but there is nothing like "svn diff" on my machine.
Daniel
Nickolay Ponomarev
> twentyafterfour wrote:
> > I think tortoiseSVN has a way to generate a diff without using a
> > command line.
>
> Yes, I can right click on a file and select diff. This will show me
> either the build in merging tool or winMerge (depending on settings).
> While this works fine, I don't what to do then. Should I manually copy
> the differences into a bugreport and add the +/- marks in front of each
> line? I think there must be an option to save the diff result, but I
> cannot find that.
>
>
> > And, even if it doesn't, Windows has a command prompt,
> > even if it is a bit annoying.
>
> Of course, but there is nothing like "svn diff" on my machine.
>
There sure is, svn is bundled with TortoiseSVN.
Nickolay
Daniel Kirsch
> When I used TortoiseSVN there was a "Create patch" menu item.
That's it. Thanks!
>> Of course, but there is nothing like "svn diff" on my machine.
>>
> There sure is, svn is bundled with TortoiseSVN.
Well, then I don't know where.
Daniel
twentyafterfour
that implements approximately what you have described - a <sidebars>
and <sidebar> binding....
On Jul 3, 2:45 pm, Daniel Kirsch <Iwillnotread_dan...@gmx.de> wrote:
> mark.fin...@gmail.com schrieb:
mClovis
I am a Mozilla XUL wannabe and evangelist. I have been trying to (as
V.P. of Development for my company) use XUL as a front end for some open
source offerings and was trying to use Programmer's Notepad and many
suggestions to put together and environment.
1. I am curious as what is your suggestions for the best way to write
and debug, maybe even test-drive, a XUL application. I have read most of
your comments (from EMACS to let's give the newbies and IDE), so I
thought I would ask "What are you using?".
2. I started following XUL a while back and had a number of
conversations with Kevin Kelley of IBM ( he had written a XUL plugin to
Eclipse on alpha works). He said NO ONE downloaded it. He currently is
head of the Compound XML Document Toolkit. I sent an Email to him and
Robert Goodman (Lead of the Ajax Toolkit Framework) on seeing with some
modifications would their work(s) give you a basis for an IDE. It is my
belief that it would. He replied...
The ATF team is bog down trying to get some major changes done. It is
going to be next week before we will be able to look at this and get
back to you.
Thanks
Bob
3. I am very aggressively trying to understand the best way to progress
in writing a usable application and help move the overall understanding
of XUL forward. Any insights by anyone would be helpful.
Thanks
Michael Clovis
MindBridge Software
Monkey
based on Mozilla technologies - it supports XUL and related formats
quite well. Though it is lacking some heavy duty IDE features, I
believe that there is a pro version available for $200 iirc.
Also, take a look at XUL:Explorer, it's free and useful for
experimenting with XUL: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL_Explorer
mClovis
Keeping community updated...
Robert Goodman Eclipse ATF head is still promising to look into the
possibilities once his current release is out the door. He sent another
note.
Kevin Kelly also from IBM stated..
The Eclipse compound document editor would be a good editor for Mozilla.
We use it to build content targeting Firefox already. If they want to
use it as a starting point that would be great. We also have support for
the WICD profile in it now - see http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item156
Mike Clovis
Matthew Gertner
look more closely at implementation strategy once we have the
requirements firmed up. I'm also going to ask some friends at Sun to
pitch me on NetBeans so I can get a better idea of whether it is
competitive considering all the momentum behind Eclipse.
Matt
twentyafterfour
personally I don't like it much. NetBeans is not much better or worse
from what I have seen.
Why would we want a mozilla ide based on java? I think that any
mozilla IDE should be based on mozilla. Personally, I will continue to
use Komodo and it would take a gun pointing at my head to make me use
Eclipse (or any other java-based bloatware) for my development
environment.