As I mentioned in the update to my last post about the svn bindings for php, Wez has gone off like a rocket adding almost every feature under the sun to the extension. Authentication, repository creation, diff's etc. all appear to be working. So in another fit of itch scratching, I started hacking on a Subversion browser, using the bindings to blow away the rather staid and dull efforts that have gone before...
With a little XUL magic, and some clever tricks with xmlhttprequest, I threw most of the interface and application together in 2 evenings, Proving what I always suspected, XUL/JS/PHP is going to be a pretty hard combo to beat in terms of rapid development, and delivery.
It has a large feature set already, and probably does as much, if not more, that most of the alternatives out there.
FlexySvn is still being hacked at, although you should be able to get an idea of how it works from looking at the
XUL Template, and the
Page's action class. A downloadable version should be available after I go back and make a few tweaks to the svn bindings so the return values are more sensible. eg. using common names for log and ls details like
- rev = the revision
- time = a unix utime() number
- datetime = a iso short formated version of the time (eg. 2001-01-01 10:30:12)
- author (rather than modified_by or other names.)
- ... others.. that need some thought....
The one major missing feature at present is the Edit page, which initially started off with the idea of using the HTML editor code from my web site, and webdav javascript posting to save. However, I have started pondering if writing a mozilla pluggin to use scintilla might be quite cute. This is apparently something like what Komodo does.
The only drawback is that the documentation on how to build mozilla plugins on unix, are a little thin on the ground. My limited research indicated that using the build scripts from
plugger and some of the code from the mozilla pluggin SDK might be the way to go, but then you have to start wondering, if you make the browser an editor, what happens when you accidentally write a neverending loop in javascript.. and render it on another window, - It will crash your editor?!... oops.
ub
