Forum OpenACS Development: Developmnet tools, debuggers, IDEs, etc

I'm am little annoyed with my OACS development technique which I find very inefficient, coding with vi, writing ns_log Notice lines, no debugger, no IDE, restarting server, checking nsd-error.log for clues why this does not work as it should.

I'm sure there are people who have developed better techniques then this one, and I hope you share your ideas.

over time the Emacs OACS Minor Mode will incorporate a successor to nsd.el. The current beta however addresses several of your concerns. Do give it a try. Emacs in vi compatability mode (VIPER) should ease the transition.

/Bart

I used vi/vim/gvim for over 10 years of my life, and nothing will ever get me back the time i wasted.

emacs makes you more productive period.

The mode-less editor was invented at Xerox-Parc in the 1960s. Don't clutter your mind with mode switching!

Plus things like the sql-postgres/oracle mode are helpful, as is the CVS integration.

I really want to modify the tcl mode/imenu to recognise ad_procs. I modified my old vim ctags/hilite modes to do this, but my lisp isn't really up to scratch yet.

Unfortunately, if you are expecting context-senstive prompts, etc. then you are out of luck (at least at this time), although you may (I have no idea, as I have not tried, this is just a guess) be able to do some of it using AcitveState's Komodo/ActiveTcl -- it may be possible to teach it Aolserver-specific procedures, etc.  This won't be free, however.

There's also TclPro (again, ActiveState) that allows you to debug Tcl procedures.  Again, I have no experience with this, but am sure that a few people on this forum may tell you whether it worked for them.

I said it's not available -- and am not sure whether this really is needed/worth th etime and effort.

I sort of expected that TclPro would not help much, btw.

thank you for sharing your oacs-mode! It looks very useful for oacs developers.

I followed the installation instructions without problems until I tried adding sql mode to XQL files. After copying your code snippets into my .emacs file I get this error during emacs startup:
Symbol's value as variable is void: xml-mode
I don't know lisp and so I'm not able to debug it: perhaps you can help posting your .emacs file?

TIA, Claudio

as http://www.thecodemill.biz/services/oacs/ describes, Emacs OACS depends on the PSGML and MMM modules. Be sure to install them. Installation instructions are included each module. You'll find links to these modules from http://www.thecodemill.biz/services/oacs/.

/Bart

Just an additional note: It's not enough to just install mmm-mode and psgml according to the INSTALL files that come with them (they are generic). At least I didn't get the needed .el and .elc files copied to /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp, so I had to manually make subdirs for both of them in that dir and then copy the files over.

.emacs file also has to be configured so that they get loaded:

(autoload 'sgml-mode "psgml" "Major mode to edit SGML files." t)
(autoload 'xml-mode "psgml" "Major mode to edit XML files." t)

(require 'mmm-auto)

(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/mmm")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/psgml")
(add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/oacs")
(require 'oacs)

to answer your questions.

1) Yes, just turn syntax highlighting on. Emacs OACS doesn't change the syntax highlighting.

2) Like all files for which OACS is activated, OACS identifies it self as OACS. OACS is a so called minor mode which combines with the major mode of the file being edited. You will that the OACS menu option in ADP files is specific to the ADP sub mode. In short you automatically enter the ADP sub mode when you open an ADP file.

/Bart

you've gotten rid of the "external entity not found" warning because of the last line in the catalog:

    DOCTYPE master "xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

This tells PSGML to treat all files opened in PSGML mode starting with <master> to be treated as XHTML.

While this gets rid of the aforementioned error, it does have a side effect which might be worse. I found that indenting a region (M-x indent-region or C-M-\) doesn't work well anymore. In particular when the region contains <if> ADP tags.

Should find indenting to be more important than the present of an warning message when you open an ADP file then I recommend removing the last line in the catalog.

On the other hand, the added benefit of the catalog line is that you can now use C-c C-e (and other PSGML key bindings) to insert valid XHTML tags. Of course this doesn't help with ADP tags as the XHTML dtd doesn't know about those.

Please note that you would still get the "extrenal entity not found" warning for ADP files NOT starting with <master>.

In short, there is no perfect solution, which is not suprising as ADP files are not valid XML. But depending on your preferences you can configure a workable environment.

/Bart

ADPs can't always be valid XML. See https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=158094.

/Bart

Tom,

I can't see why this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
 <title>@title@</title> <!-- keep @var@'s -->
</head>

<body>
  <p>Got a list @list@</p>
  <p>Looping over list:</p>
  <ul>
    <tcl:foreach name="l" select="list">
      <li><tcl:value-of select="l" /></li>
    </tcl:foreach>
  </ul>

  <p>Got an array @array@</p>

  <p>Looping over Array:</p>
  <table>
    <tr>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Age</th>

      <th>City</th>
    </tr>
    <tcl:foreach name="a" select="array">
      <tr>
        <td><tcl:value-of select="a(name)" /></td>
        <td><tcl:value-of select="a(age)" /></td>
        <td><tcl:value-of select="a(city)" /></td>
      </tr>
    </tcl:foreach>
  </table>

</body>
</html>

would look much worse than this:

<html>
<head>
 <title>$title</title>
</head>
<body>

<p>Got a list $list

<p>Looping over list:
<ul>
[foreach l $list]
 <li>$l</li>
[/foreach]
</ul>

<p>Got an array $array
<p>Looping over Array:

<table>
<tr>
 <th>Name</th>
 <th>Age</th>
 <th>City</th>

</tr>
[foreach a $array]
<tr>
 <td>$a(name)</td>
 <td>$a(age)</td>
 <td>$a(city)</td>

</tr>
[/foreach]
</table>

</body>
</html>

Naturally, it *is* different, but as stated in the same thread mentioned by you --- there is no need/point in really implementing XSL. Borrowing *some* structures/approachs is all that can make ADPs valid, and hence much easier handled by a variety of tools. For one, you could actually apply a style sheet to them and display them in a browser and/or create printable output, etc.

The <tcl:value-of-select> could be replaced by the current @@ syntax for easier readability, if so required. Or shortened to <tcl:value-of>.

The work by Jun with Eclipse:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=156811

had mixed results (too slow), but it would be a great way to go.

I will also have a student looking into using argoUML to generate acs_types and generate OACS code with a modelling tool. It would be great ... but it is ages away.

cheers

Rafael

could you provide a link to the #openacs log discussing CEDET? OpenACS search is failing me. Anyhow, Emacs OACS already works with speedbar. Install speedbar and you can browse SQL functions or TCL procedures w/ speedbar.

Speedbar is not required. An index to function/procedure definitions is already available from the Index menu using stock Emacs OACS.

I personally lack the time to investigate integration with CEDET or any of the other EMACS programmer utilities (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CategoryProgrammerUtils) such as the Emacs Code Browser (http://ecb.sourceforge.net/). All Lisp hacker contributions are welcome. Just mirror the GNU Archive of Emacs OACS (see http://www.thecodemill.biz/services//oacs/) and hack at it!

/Bart