I am writing this in a canvas-based, curses-style text editor that I have incorporated into my site at http://luvluvluv.info. But more about that later...
I started working on the current incarnation of my site just over 3 months ago... my challenge was to develop the best possible JavaScript Web interface, so I chose to use OSX as my model. Ever since I learned about node.js and got bitten by the JavaScript bug, I have wanted to see how far I could push the boundaries of web programming. I can honestly say at this point: pretty damn far, LOL! I finished all of the major icon and window handling work quite a while ago, and I have been recently working on window tiling, the above-mentioned text editor, and now, a chat application. I want to use this site as something that can do, well, anything really. And to be able to do anything, you really do need a text editor that is up to the task. The editor is something of a combination between my favorite aspects of nano and vim. I like nano because there are no weird "major modes" to trip you up. If you press a key expecting a letter to show up at the cursor, you will always get what you expect. But at the same time, I do enjoy a lot of the functionality of vim. I have put a lot of effort into allowing a lot of different ways to select blocks of text and move them around the page, as well as shifting and trimming/cutting/padding the entire file itself (or portions thereof). I wanted to be able to easily create column-based text documents that could be used for things like push-button database loading (table creation, etc) as well as even doing run time data binding from within the text editor itself (to use it as a kind of in-browser database solution). I even added a command mode that allows users to input arbitrary commands on the status line, so that it can double as a simple command shell. At the moment, there are only a few commands related to editing, but there is no reason to not extend it to more "interesting" functions :) It wasn't until about 3 months into the programming effort that I even start to *think* about the server side. I wanted to have a tight little chat window that could put node to good use. The chat app is currently at a very basic level, but I want to be able to extend it to allow users to construct natural language queries to submit to the server (I have done quite a bit of NatLang programming in the past, and I'm looking forward to integrating some of my old stuff onto the current site.) There is really so much possibility when using this thing as a development environment. It will allow a new kind of web programming that abstracts away the horrible DOM API very nicely. Here are some of the kinds of applications that I am interested in prototyping/developing. 1) Educational software: this will give educators the ability to quickly develop online lecture presentation material, as well as allowing for the ability to administer and monitor web-based test taking. 2) Government agency web interfaces: for any agency that is concerned primarily with getting its users to navigate to a particular resource, interfaces like this can be very valuable. The web interfaces of most governmental sites leave much to be desired, haha :) 3) Businesses: everything from online customer support to order entry screens to inventory tracking can be greatly facilitated with this technology. Well, this letter has honestly been my first "real" use of this cool little text editor (I call it "archiTex"), and I have to say that I am pretty satisfied with it. Hopefully some of you out there can give it a shot and tell me what you think. There are pretty detailed instructions on the site (just click on the Help icon on the dock at the bottom of the page). And I almost forgot to mention: I only develop for Google Chrome, so I highly recommend that you use that. Safari should be pretty much the same for most uses, and Firefox "might" work, but I don't really care too much if it does. I could not care less if the site causes IE to crash and burn, LOL. -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to nodejs@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to nodejs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
