[Dynapyide-developer] Greetings!

[Dan S. <fa...@fu...>]

Just wanted to make mention I'm on board this project.  I noticed Henrik forwarded my message about my existing Java application for a dynapi ide.  But to reiderate, you can look at a screenshot, and download the source here:

http://fury161.dyndns.org/dyneditor/

It was by no means complete, but a good start.  We can use this as a starting point and work forward from here.  Please download it, see how it works etc.  If anyone else has written some code at all please let everyone know.

Also, lets just have a head count to see how many people are seriously interested in contributing to the project.  If you're not going to be writing any code, then you don't need to be listed as a "developer" for the project.

Unless there is any objections, we'll use my code for the starting point.  So everyone should take a good look through my source code to see how I half hazardly put things together :).  Get an idea as to what you want to change, what new features you want to work on, and let everyone else know.

What I want to work on right now is to get some preliminary input/output working.  Saving to a file, using dynapi code.  I will be researching using java object serialization to do this - I have not done this before, but will give it a shot.

Some other major tasks that others can do:

1. Text Editor
As I understand you guys want this to be a wysiwyg + editor.  So someone has to take charge of editor portion.  Since I wrote the drawing code, I guess for now that makes me in charge of the wysiwyg portion.  So who is interested in doing some R&D to implement an editor for this app?  I would seriously consider using an existing Java Editor, one that has syntax highlighting already written - saves us an enormous amount of time.  I don't know if you'd want to also reasearch how the Rhino JS parser could be used.  The text editor would obviously be linked to the I/O code that I will write, so we would need to collaborate further.

2. HTML Editing
My editor only has some rudimentary Layer/Text support.  If you want this to support full HTML, tables, etc. someone has to be responsible for this.  Personally I think for a first version of the software to only include support for Layers with Images and basic text inside them.  HTML support did scare me, and that's why I was going to mostly avoid it for my little app.  Does anyone know of any libraries we can use for this purpose?  Unless we use something already built I forsee us building our own little rudimentary web browser ourselves as things go along. 

3. Property Pane
I had a lot of troubles creating a property in my code.  The Java documentation on this is terrible.  If someone who has more experience with this sort of stuff, please step up and take charge of creating a great reusable property pane that can be used for changing the size/color/text of the layers.

4. Timeline Animation
I'd like to add support for creating animations, complete support such as what Dreamweaver can do.  For the moment this is secondary to the stuff above as it can be added later with little architectural problems.  I guess I'll take responsibility for this as thing progress further, unless someone else really really wants to do it now.

5. Events
My app has no way to add events of any kind.  Someone has to implement a system by which mouse events can be added to the layers, and the corresponding I/O for this.

6. Widgets
As mentioned, I only wrote some classes for drawing layers, and simple Labels (the label needs a bit of work).  Adding Images (DynImage) would be fairly straightforward also.  But the big problem is how do we support adding other widgets.  Do we write a Java class to mimic what the JS object does?  That means a lot of work, basically rewriting each widget in Java for our editor.  I have really no other suggestions except perhaps making some kind of conversion tool, ie. JS-to-Java system.  I dunno, but someone should really spend some time thinking about this, and figuring something out.

7. Project Name Change
I'll admit it, I hate "DynapyIDE".  Lets have a vote on a name change.  I suggest using my "DynEditor" name, or better yet I thought of a new one today "Dydo" - it's cute, short, catchy, and as far as I know is not being used by any other open source project.  There is only some Japenese company name Dydo. 

I think that about covers the major portions that need a lot of thought and research.  Please come forward with your plans - lets get organized!!

Dan Steinman
da...@da...