[wtp-pmc] Ajax World summary and ATF issues

[Robert Goodman <goodmanr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Below is a summary of my presentation
at AJAX world and a few issues I will like to discuss with the PMC. Since
I am sending this note late and there a number of people are traveling,
we can put this off for a week. Because of a conflict I will be about 10-
20 minutes late for the start of the call. 


Ajax World

The presentation of ATF at the AJAX
World conference went well. Even though it was at 6:30pm on the last day,
I had at least 150 people attend the presentation. I was surprise at the
number of people that had already used eclipse and ATF at the conference.
Didn't have a lot of time for question, but the top ones were

1. When will Mac be supported? We are having problems getting the embedded browser running on Mac in ATF. We will need to raise the priority of resolving this.
2. Why isn't the HTTP server support and SWT mozilla browser support in WTP and eclipse base respectively.
3. When is XULRunner 1.8.1 going to be available so full CSS tooling is supported. We have provided a hand built version of XULRunner 1.8.1 until Mozilla can start doing builds after the release of Firefox 2 at the end of October.

I have found out that there are 3 companies
that are integrating in ATF in their products. Since the companies haven't
announced it publicly yet, I will tell you their names in the call. It
not a secret, but I don't want to put it on a listserv that anybody could
be subscribe. 2 of the companies want to plan to start dedicating resources
to the project. One of the companies is already providing patches to the
project. I would like to hear any words of wisdom from the WebTools PMC
and bringing new people on the project. 

Other issues

SWT Browser

Because of our SWT fragment that we
have to support the embedded mozilla browser, we have platform specific
builds. I looks like we may have to do a 64-bit linux build due to the
fact that the browser handle returned by the base has a different size
on 64-bit linux. We are still investigating this, but this requirement
may cause some problem with integrating in with the WTP builds in the future.



_javascript_ Editor

In our next release we are going to
write a new _javascript_ Editor. We feel that we need a good _javascript_ editor
with a real _javascript_ model to provide our next set of tools. Some of
the capabilities that we would like to provide are the following. 

Syntax highlighting 
Code folding 
Configurable formatting 
Code completion 
Quick fix 
syntax checking/error display 
Hover help/tips 
Occurrences marking 
open selected item 
highlight matching parenthesis/brace/bracket

add/remove/generate comment 
Typing helpers: 
Automatically close strings, parentheses,
brackets,etc 
Automatically insert semicolons, braces

automatic formatting 

The plans are to copy the JDT and refactor
the code to support _javascript_. We have done this before for ActionScript.
Below is the high level plan

The high level plan as follows:

1. Copy the 3.2 level JDT code.
2. refactor java -> _javascript_ , org.eclipse.jdt -> org.eclipse.jsdt, etc .
3. update syntax definitions, parsing, etc to _javascript_
4. class inferencing
5. update/refactor jdt junit tests to _javascript_ and make work
6. update ui
7. remove dead code (any java functionality not used)
8. determine what code is unchanged from JDT and figure out how to share with JDT

Specific work items (non-exhaustive):

• Update syntax definition to _javascript_
• Add AST nodes for _javascript_ Object literal, array initializer, and "for (var in collection)"
• Change junit test cases from testing java to be the corresponding _javascript_
• Add inferencing framework
  • Generic inferencing engine
  • Configuration support
  • Change formatting code to support _javascript_
  • Change syntax highlight code to support _javascript_
  • Remove non-applicable actions from ui
  • Expose ast as XML dom
  • Refactoring
    • Change to run based on inferred types
    • May need to display dialog when not confident about what needs to change
    • Code completion
      • Possible completion parser changes
      • Quick fix
        • Add _javascript_ possibilities
        • Remove non applicable possibilities
        
        
        We have already started working on this effort, but since this is not an insignificant amount of work, I wanted to bring this up with the PMC.
        
        There is a second possible option that has come up which is that JSEclipse (http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Eclipse/JSEclipse/Overview/) may wish to contribute their editor. I tried to get on there site to get their license to see if it was ok to play with the editor. Don't want to get contaminated, but since interaltonline was taken over by Adobe, their site is in transition. I guess I should tell them to contribute the editor to eclipse and fill out all the contribution questionnaire, so we can look at the editor and the code.
        
        Dependencies on outside code.
        
        I had filled out a contribution questionnaire for putting ATF's dependences on outside code (dojo, xulrunner, etc.) on eclipse. I'm thinking of dropping this plan. We are already looking at moving up to different version from the ones I submitted and adding a couple a new AJAX runtimes. I don't think that eclipse legal can keep up with the pace we would like to proceed. I'm looking at adding some preference wizards where users can tell us where the dependencies reside and we will handle everything from there.
        
        We have been offered by one of the companies that is integrating ATF into there product to host a complete package on their site. We could then point to his site from the ATF eclipse page. I have some concerns about this, but would like to get the PMC views on this.
        
           Thanks
             bob
        
        
        
        Robert Goodman
        IBM Emerging Technologies
        goodmanr@xxxxxxxxxx
        512-838-8824    T.L. 678-8824