On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 7:23 AM, Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org wrote:
Very cool. Especially given the development trajectory of Ace to become the "eclipse" of web IDEs there will be a lot of interesting possibilities as we could develop our own mediaWiki centric plugins for the platform.
I can't help but think about where this is ideally headed ;)
A gitorius type system for easy branching with mediaWiki.org code review style tools, with in browser editing. With seemless workflows for going from per user developing and testing on the live site, to commits to your personal repository, to being reviewed and tested by other developers, to being enabled by interested users, to being enabled by default if so desired.
[snip lots of awesome sauce]
I, for one, welcome our new integrated development overlords! :D I started up a page of notes and smaller steps on the road to awesomeness which we can start expanding on:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gadget_Studio
The main things I want to hit in the immediate future are syntax highlighting (including clear detection of parse errors, which I don't think Ace does yet) for editing gadgets and site & user scripts. For the upcoming parser stuff we'll want to do lots of experiments, and rapid prototyping the JavaScript-side implementations seems like a good way to get stuff into preliminary testing quickly, so being able to tweak code and immediately re-run it on something is going to be nice.
I like the idea of being able to work on a core or extension JS module "in-place" too though, that could be interesting. :) Not everything will be amenable to being reloaded in the middle of a page view, but things that are could benefit from that kind of testing turnover.
-- brion