I think it's more than possible and that it would be reasonably easy to create a good drawview editor and a layout management tool.
Also that it is absolutely the way to go. I've looked into creating graphical editors that could live in eclipse and it doesn't seem nearly as easy, despite the nice bitmap operations that java provides. Finally the stuff that James mentions points to the real reason doing it in lzx would be best. And that is that IDE's and editors have reached a high point for editing text files, but have stagnated and are generally rudimentary when it comes to graphics and more importantly, frameworks. I think that most frameworks really would be helped dramatically with some rudimentary ide support that 1) manages the frameworks core ideas for you and 2) provides information to the programmer as to what the focus of the framework is. For a few years now I've been thinking of how this should work and the thing that has kept me from actually anything are 1) being unable to easily compile and extend the core lfc files and 2) the ammount of work involved in getting something to be usefull in practice. But the attention this thread is getting makes me think that maybe it would be ok to just focus on some of the simpler components that would be necessary (color chooser, palette manager, animator) and let some ground up experimentation work from various folk build towards an end result. I would like to mention, too, that one of the reasons I like the idea of using Komodo for an IDE is that by being a mozilla app, I could see various components and features existing first as a firefox extention brought into komodo for local development, but also live in a browser as an lzx app someday. Finally, once you were to get an lzx ide up there, we could bring code colaboration and extreeme programming practices to a new level. Two last thoughts 1) we really need to add some of the flash 8 bitmap operations to the drawing api and 2) we really want the graphical part of the editor to be in swf and the code part of an editor to be in dhtml so we can use the graphical features of swf and the text processing speed of dhtml and regular expressions without requiring the flash 9 player. Anyway, my 2c -Cort On 4/20/07, Not Zippy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just my thoughts. Before getting into the large scale IDE I would rethink the initial simplistic view and why wrappers like eclipse fail for this. Basically for an nice GUI IDE you would like to be able to draw from a set of widgets and place them inside another container. The problem with eclipse (and others) are multiple: 1) You need to deploy the application to the laszlo server to compile and return you your widget. This (obviously) takes time. 2) How do you present the widget ? You cannot really provide and drop target on a flash object. A possible solution would be to extract the compiler out of tomcat so the widget can be compiled but then you have to also provide a runtime target that supports the drag & drop. Html may be getting close but it isnt there yet. A different approach is needed... Might it be possible to build an IDE using laszlo AS the IDE ?
