Forum OpenACS Development: Things to make OACS 4 development easier

1: Things to make OACS 4 development easier

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/23/02 12:54 PM

While I was thinking about the training guide for new developers I was
hoping you could share some best practices on actual coding utilities.
In particular, what do you use in emacs to make your life with
development easier. I was thinking in the lines of nsd.el which shows
you the error log and lets you copy paste queries with bind variables
or the "show me the queries" functions described at
https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0005OL&topic_id=12&topic=OpenACS%204%2e0%20Design.

Maybe someone has written a split view which would show you the
complete SQL query or the procedure definition. Or anything else you
thought of as useful or any new ideas which would make development
live easier which you didn't implement just yet.

Last but not least, what are the command strikes you use most often,
so we could add them up in the training guide.

I'll have my first victim end of September, so I want to have
everything (read: Training guide into developing and adopting packages
of OpenACS 4.5 and higher versions) ready by end of August.

2: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 07/25/02 02:16 AM

Malte,

I am preparing a course on web application frameworks. All the practical stuff will be about using/developing OACS.
It is still very premature as I have been busy on other things but you can have a look at:
http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/ebus5002

The slides are linked in the section "News"

3: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 07/25/02 03:58 AM

Rafael,

I read your paper (published on Ausweb) about OpenACS. It lists "oacs.org" as the URL for "OpenACS Documentation". oacs.org is a christian education website 😊

4: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Jun Yamog on 07/25/02 08:59 AM

Hi Rafael,

Can we add a link to your draft docbook? I know its not yet final but is sure would help someone new to OpenACS. In particular can we add that to this section?

https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/

I would like to add it myself but I would like to ask permission first or you may add it yourself.

5: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Rafael Calvo on 07/26/02 04:27 AM

Roberto, thanks for the correction!!

Jun, I just added the link to the OACS documentation page, thanks for the suggestion.

Any recomendations about the content would be very much appreciated. The "draft book" material is *really* lame at this stage, the slides and other things will hopefully be more useful. I have a couple of pretty nice animations using Real that I plan to upload in a week or so.

6: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 07/29/02 02:42 PM

malte: i'm working on a brief "emacs for oacs" guide that has all the little tricks i've picked up. stuff like "how do I get the tab key to insert x spaces instead of a tab character". it won't have the fancy lisp stuff that I don't use, but stuff like an overview of the useful cvs commands, etc.

coming soon.

7: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/29/02 10:19 PM

Hello Arjun,

this is exactly what I had in mind. Furthermore thanks a lot to Rafael for his draftbook. I will happily send some comments along if you don't mind, once I read it 😊.

8: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/02/02 03:05 AM

Arjun said: 'i'm working on a brief "emacs for oacs" guide that has all the little
tricks i've picked up. stuff like "how do I get the tab key to insert x spaces instead of a tab character"'

I'm curious as to why it's an advantage to insert spaces instead of tabs. With tabs I can change the number of spaces very easily, so if you've inserted a tab and I like 8 space tabs (I do) but you like 2-space tabs, then that's no problem.

But when you insert spaces, that's it. Emacs' default behavior is to insert spaces, something I've been looking for how to change. I know this is a matter of style, and style is a non-issue, but I'm curious as to what advantages you see for spaces versus tabs.

9: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Jun Yamog on 08/02/02 05:02 AM

Hi Roberto,

I think its because not all editors treat tab the same way. For example in if Emacs uses 4 spaces for tabs and when you open it in Notepad it suddenly changes to 8. Using spaces rather than tabs makes it the text file more universal to other text editors.

10: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Arjun Sanyal on 08/02/02 05:17 AM

roberto: the tabs to spaces thing is just an example of something that new emacs users want to do, but there's no quick reference for. i could have given an example of how to set the default tab width to 3.

This is not to take a position on the "Eternal Holy War" or set a standard, just giving an example.

For background on the issue see (warning: contains spoilers): http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

Odd, my default config for emacs (GNU) is to insert tabs, that's why i added the line to .emacs in the first place by a vi user who will remain anonymous.

i like the explicitness of spaces, but i'll leave it to a true believer to sing the gospel of spaces.

11: Response to Things to make OACS 4 development easier (response to 1)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 08/11/02 08:15 PM

FWIW, I've worked for several sofware companies and all the ones that had coding standards required a specific number of spaces instead of tabs.

The main reason is because code reviews are still conducted around a conference room table with printouts, and this ensures that everyone is seeing the code in the way that they are used to. If everyone sets their own spacing it can be incredibly distracting to look at it with someone else's spacing.