YES!!
A visual design tool using Laszlo itself is "Plan A" here at Laszlo
Systems. We don't want to get into Eclipse -- really. Lesson
learned. :-)
We definitely need to sort out internal priorities here before we
commit resources, but this is where I think we'd like to go:
* This visual design tool would consist of a Laszlo front end
(browser-based) that is paired with a Java back-end that manipulates
LZX files on the server's filesystem
* The normal mode of using this tool would be within the Tomcat
installation (or other app server) on the developer's machine
* It would support "Round-trip" editing of LZX code. So, manual
coding (in Eclipse, for example) can be intertwined with visual
editing using the visual design tool
* Any component/class defined in LZX, whether built-in or developer-
defined, would be represented in the visual tool, automatically or
with trivial hinting in the class declaration
* The "preview" representation of the app would be rendered using the
actual LZX code, in either Flash or Ajax.
The structure of this project would be designed so that it is easy to
contribute to the effort.
Futures could include a hosted version, an on-line collaborative tool
(a social network for developers?) and so on, since this is an
intrinsically web-based architecture. Eclipse hardly lends itself to
this kind of development.
- D.
On Apr 20, 2007, at 10:11 AM, Francisco Jose Peredo wrote:
Hi!
I agree with you, building the Laszlo IDE using Laszlo itself would
be the best possible approach:
First it would show that Laszlo is a mature platform, capable of
creating its own tools (I believe that is one of the reasons all
Java IDEs are written in Java)
It would isolate Laszlo from the IDE wars (yes, I know some people
belive eclipse has already won, but I am not that sure, I don't
like it that much... I would prefer to hava a "pure Laszlo" design
surface, and then let someone else worry about embedding it in
Eclipse, IntelliJ or Netbeans (or something else).
If the desing capabilities are embbeded inside a nice and reusable
framework, the that could be used as a basis for other Laszlo based
applications (like a Laszlo based report designer or word processor)
I would be an excelent advanced sample application.
It could take advantage of the hype Adobe Apollo will generate by
running standalone inside it.
I believe this is definitely the way to go....
Not Zippy escribió:
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 ?
