So managing the files is a source of problems for newbies. Spindle helps (as people tell me on a not-irregular basis) but there's a piece or pieces missing.
What follows is a "pie-in-the-sky" vision. Much of what I'll describe isn't doable (by me) right now either because there's no support in Eclipse, or because its beyond my abilities. What spindle needs is a new editor. A sooper-editor! look at http://www.asp.net/ in particular Web Matrix, download it, do the first tutorial! (warning. don't throw things, I just pointed you at the enemy) I spent a few hours playing with it and while it is ASP and therefore sucks, the IDE interface rocks. You can drag and drop components onto the html editor part of the web-page, it has tabs for source, things get wired up as you go. A brief summary for sure, check it out or take my word for it. I see a Spindle editor that has three tabs: WYSIWYG HTML - containing the template SPEC - the xml JAVA - the java file The HTML tab would be the coolest and also the hardest (if not impossible) part to build. WYSYWIG with the ability to toggle between showing the source, or even showing the source for a particular tag. All the functionality currently supplied by the tabs on a Spindle editor would be available on this page as pop-ups. Or, perhaps available in an Outline view (Spindle's is really simple, navigation only). I was looking at the ICE browser recently and they claim that thier presentation layer is abstracted from the rest. I wonder how hard it would be to implement an SWT version and add the WYSIWYG stuff. Pie in the sky though as ICE browser is closed source (and expensive!). The SPEC tab would contain a much better XML editor than Spindle provides now. Code completion, suggestions, even pop-ups containing some of the current non-xml functionality. (Text editors in Eclipse are not my strong point) And the Java tab would contain, of course, the sourcefile (if there is one). The cool thing would be hooking up all three tabs so that if, for example, you added a parameter and no such property existed in the java file, you could ask (or expect) to have one created. Closely coupling refactoring in there so if something changes in one tab, its either automatically updated in the others, or the user is given the option of picking and choosing what gets updated. The next yummie part would be to have a "runtime" implementation of the Tapestry internals that's built to run in a development environment. I'd like to see the day when one creates a template, adds components, specifies the barest minimum amount of parameters (even leaving out some required ones), and you can still run the application! The app would open a smart browser-like window where you can navigate to all the pages, view the underlying template source, navigate the machine state, and if the runtime detects that a required parameter value is missing, prompts the developer to enter it. The runtime stuff would make it possible to set parameters,paths etc with cool little popups as the machine state would be available. This would also be great for debugging as you could change stuff on the fly. Kinda breaks with the spec-is-king paradigm. But,at development time, isn't the developer really the king? There's a plugin for eclipse out there that records HTTP requests and plays them back as a debuggin aid (I forget the name). This would be useful in the sooper-spindle world as many pages are very context sensitve so it might be difficult or tedious, in some cases, to navigate in the 'runtime' tapestry to some pages. Or, a particular page might be hard to debug unless you entered this value here on this page and that value on that page first. Being able to record the session and play it back in the "runtime" Tapestry environment would be a great help! You could automate test cases! In fact why not create a Tapestry Perspective in Eclipse that's "tuned" to operate with these editors. You could hide the whole Tapestry Project thing altogether. I read somewhere that redmond spend something like 1.5 billion on the next version of Office. Ahh, if only we could do that! Geoffrey Longman Intelligent Works Inc. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Tapestry-developer mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tapestry-developer
