Visage Language Documentation

[Stephen Chin]

I posted a draft of the Visage Language Guide for folks to get an early
look and help review the content.

It is based on Chapters 2 and 4 of the Pro JavaFX Platform book that
were originally written by Weiqi Gao. I updated it for the Visage
language, including all the new language features we have added in the
past year.

The guide is posted in the downloads area here (it is only available in
MS Word format for now):
http://code.google.com/p/visage/downloads/detail?name=VisageLanguageGuide.doc&can=2&q=
<http://code.google.com/p/visage/downloads/detail?name=VisageLanguageGuide.doc&can=2&q=>

If you would like to give feedback, please turn on track changes and
markup the document with your corrections. That is the easiest way for
me to quickly incorporate it back in to the document. If you give me
feedback in the next couple weeks, your changes will make it in to the
Pro JavaFX Platform 2 book (and I will make sure you get credited).

Enjoy!

Cheers,
--
--Steve
blog: http://steveonjava.com/

[William Antônio Siqueira]

Stephen,

Sounds a great document. I'll download, convert to PDF and read today in my Galaxy S.

Thanks.
--
William Antônio Siqueira

Java Support Analyst

Colaborador do JavaFree.org

2011/10/19 Stephen Chin <st...@widgetfx.org>

[Robert Casey]

Thanks for starting this document, Stephen.

[Alain Béarez]

Steve, 

May I suggest a first huge change in the way you are writing the code examples?

When I first began with JavaFX Script (2010-08-18), I found it hard to distinguish when I could leave colon or must include it. Until I forged a simple two-folded formatting rule for myself:

- the colon has a space before it and no space after it if followed by a type (most of the time a class name);

- the colon has no space before it and a space after it if preceded by the name of an instance variable in an object literal.

In places where I could omit the type specifier, the colon would disappear as well, since it is part of the type specifier.

In places where I would omit the variable name, eg. a function signature used as a type, the colon would be kept, since it is part of the type specifier.

With the default instance variable introduced by Visage, there is no exception to these rules: no variable name implies no colon.

In places where I could not omit the variable name and there is no type (ie. an instance variable initialization in an object literal), the colon has to be kept, since it is the assignment operator [off-topic: only in that place of the language, in that respect Scala is more coherent, but JavaFX Script was more similar to JavaScript].

Downside of these rules: no IDE support for such a "complex" formatting.

Not worth crediting...

Alain

PS: These are the formatting I have been using in my code contributed to the visage.javafx project, for those interested in seeing true code samples.