In case you have not heard, Ruby on Rails (RoR) <http://
rubyonrails.com/> is getting a lot of attention in Web Development
circles. It is a neat environment, but basically the same kind of
Models, Views, Controllers structure as Fusebox. Both require some
(maybe a lot) and study to become useful.
One of the interesting statistics on RoR is that the the majority of
the developers are using Mac OS X! When someone posted a question
asking why this was the case - the majority of the responses were
"TextMate..." <http://macromates.com/>. TextMate is a Mac only text
editor that is still maturing, but....
As a long time user of BBEdit, I reluctantly took Doug Hall's advise
and played around with TextMate this weekend. I've tried jedit and
fortunately I don't need to do cross platform editing (and would
retire before I would!). I'm sure jedit is a great development
environment for Active4D, but I couldn't get past all the non-Mac-
like stuff and new terminology.
After about 10 hours of playing with TextMate, trying to understand
it's language formating, project views etc., I think I might be
convinced to move from BBEdit.
Much like jedit, it has project view, language formating, macros and
what they call snippets that will auto-complete a section of code
based on a keyword and tab action. Works fine for ruby, html,
javascript, php, etc. But what about Active4D? If I understood
RegEx, I'm sure I could of done this a little faster, but I've
created a rudimentary Active4D Bundle (where all the language stuff
goes) for TextMate.
For instance I created a snippet "whilenot", that if you type
"whilenot" followed by a tab would produce:
First Record([])
while (not(end selection([])))
# code...
next record([])
end while
and will position the cursor in between the table brackets on line 1.
After putting in the table name and tabbing, it puts the table name
in the other table name locations and then highlights the "# code"
for further editing.
As I said, this is just a start and by no means complete - or
probably correct! I did steal the Active4D keywords and commands from
Aparajita's jedit xml file. I'm sure I'll update it, but if anyone is
interested in this early version, it can be found at <http://
maxwellgaggle.com/salex/textmate.zip>. The zip file contains 1 theme
and 2 bundles that go in ~/library/application support/TextMate.
There is a demo of TextMate at the above site. Upon opening your
first .a4d file, select HTML (A4D) as the file type/bundle.
Now, if someone can speak RegEx, they maybe able to make TextMate
sing with Active4D - I just got it to carry a tune. By using regular
expressions in the bundles editor, code highlighting, auto-indention,
etc. can be much more thorough than with other editors I've seen.
Regards,
Steve Alex
AIDT
"There are no silver bullets."
_______________________________________________
Active4D-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/mailman/listinfo/active4d-dev
Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
