Re: [Xweb-developers] Re:Reactivating development

[Peter B. <pe...@pe...>]

Hendrik Lipka wrote:

>Monday, November 10, 2003, 1:31:13 PM, you wrote:
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>>[redirected back to list, fully quoted]
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>Sometimes I forget to do a 'reply to all' :(
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I thought so -- I know the problem :-) A pity we have to misuse email 
for this type of communication anyway. But I won't give you my "Usenet 
is so much cooler"-talk right now ;-)

>>The point I want to make is that Ant is a developers tool and that the
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>ACK. But building a web site _is_ development (its also programming in some
>kind), so why not using developer tools?
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That's a developer's attitude towards website creation. I think many 
website authors think of it more in terms of writing a set of documents. 
I'd really like to cater for both audiences.

>>XWeb integration needed in this context seems to be only the XWeb task 
>>for Ant. The frontend I imagine would be more for someone setting up a 
>>small website without many IT skills -- I suspect Webbuilder has a 
>>different target audience, also I think that audience is hard to target 
>>with a GUI.
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>A real good GUI fore XWeb would also handle some parts of Ant scripting
>(e.g. for CVS or FTP access).
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Maybe there is room for two GUIs, but I wouldn't really base the 
Dreamweaver clone (aiming high here) on Ant -- the underlying notion of 
a "build" would probably shine through the GUI, and I don't think it 
suits the application. I guess the Ant integrated one I'd like to see as 
Eclipse plugin, which would give an XML editor, access to Ant and a nice 
integration -- but that won't help anyone who isn't using Eclipse. I 
wonder how hard it would be to support a bunch of IDEs with some 
framework. I guess hard, esp. since Eclipse uses a different windowing 
toolkit than IDEA, JBuilder or anything else.

>>Just look at how many people still code Java with vi or 
>>Emacs ;-) I never used much in terms of IDEs for C++, but with Java and 
>>Refactoring it is a bit different.
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>[OT]
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I don't mind some slightly off-topic discussions (as you might have 
noticed). I think the technical discussions help understand each others 
coding approaches and style and sometimes good ideas might pop up.

>Only in my early days I coded w/o a IDE. just because on the Commodores
>these days they weren't this much...
>But today the lack of a good IDE is a real problem for learing a new
>language - such a thing can decide about being productive with a language
>or not...
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Going from text editor + CLI to tools such as IDEA and then Eclipse 
(won't go into the details of that change, it is not that I call Eclipse 
better) changed my coding style significantly. It is not just easier or 
quicker, it is completely different. The availability of refactoring and 
templates makes some things easy that I considered to hard most of the 
time before the change of tools.

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>>>- I want to call a _single_ program/script, which should do everything:
>>> - generate project documentation in XML
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>>That should be covered, shouldn't it? I never really checked the Java
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>I mean this more like this:
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>- extract the documentation files from the project directory (this done by
>  ANT)
>- maybe generate a 'web version' out of this (this is done by XWeb)
>The documentation itself is plain text for the older projects, and XML for
>the newer ones (and sometimes its LaTeX).
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Ok.

>>> - determine which files have been changed since the last run
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>>Does Ant give support for that?
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>No, not really. What I really want (and hopefully will write in the next
>time) is a 3-way-diff:
>- one source directory (with the generated web site)
>- one compare directory (which contains an exact copy of the web site on the
>  web server)
>- a target directory, containing all changed data
>This way I can always determine which files I need to copy to the web
>server, w/o downloading all files everytime for comparision.
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It is probably not too hard to write such an Ant task. Actually it 
probably wouldn't be a task but a new way to define filesets -- I don't 
know if Ant supports extending that without hacking Ant itself.

>>I wonder if an Ant task for XWeb could return a <fileset> with the
>>changes.
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>I would do this as an external task. Otherwise XWeb needs to know exactly
>all the time about the content of the target web site.
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I was thinking about comparing the sourceDir with the targetDir, nothing 
more. If a timestamped version of the structure DOM is in the target 
dir, this structure could be compared to the new one.

>>> - optionally: delete old file from the website
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>>That's a tricky one. I wonder how much garbage due to renaming I have
>>created in my webspaces by now. Sometimes I do a big cleanup.
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>Tha task mentioned above would also generate a "delete list" (e.g. a shell
>script or ANT project file) containing all files to be deleted, so it can
>be done automtically.
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That hints at the other problem: do you really want it automatically. 
But I guess, sometimes you do and most likely the target site should be 
XWeb only anyway -- mixing generated content with manual content is 
rarely a good idea.

  Peter