Web-based IDE for YII

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
#1

Last 10 days I’ve been experimenting with FireFox selection API

trying to find out if it’s possible to implement a full-featured

web-based editor. Of course, there are a lot of good ones such as

CodeMirror, CodePress or 9NE. But none of them felt like home.

Must say, my experiment ended successfully and there is a working proof-of-concept script. It’s not cross-browser and only

works with FireFox 3.6(+?). It relies on W3C selection & range API.

I could implement most of desktop IDE features such as:

  • Smart indentation on newline

  • Indent/unindent selected code block

  • IDE-style caret movement on ctrl + [left/right]

  • IDE-style ctrl + [backspace]

  • IDE-style tabulation handling

  • Auto-completion of quotes and brackets

  • Auto-bypassing of closing quotes and brackets

  • ctrl + D - duplicates current line

  • ctrl + Y - removes current line

  • ctrl + G - goto specified line

  • ctrl + [up/down] - viewport scrolling

Besides all said, it’s very fast even on a large files (50K+),

has UNDO/REDO functionality (ctrl + Z, ctrl + shift + Z) and

has snippet insertion mode (type ‘class’ and press TAB).

I’ve made even more experiments and found it’s possible to

implement such things as live syntax checking, square selection,

bookmarking and code folding.

I think this script might become a good addition to GII and,

hopefully, in a very short time we’ll be able to develop WEB

projects in a browser.

Again, here is the demo link to play with an editor

[color="#FF0000"]FireFox 3.6 ONLY!!![/color]

P.S. Please let me know what you think! Comments, ideas and

bugs are more than welcome!

#2

I have been playing with it and it works like a charm. Good work.

#3

Thanks! :)

#4

Nice idea but limited user…i would say very limited as its difficult to get it to a level of desktop based IDE. Even Netbeans and Eclipse still have feature lists not implemented yet.

#5

And what are the most required features for you?

#6

It’s good - I think it will be mostly useful for quick editing of files though, rather than as a desktop replacement. It will also be useful in hosting environments, if for example you need to make changes to a file on the server and you’re away from your desktop.

#7

For me, if asked :)

Visual Interface.

#8

New things find their way in a hard way. It takes time to get people used to a new idea or concept.

For now I see that things line up very beatifully in a roadmap. For example, implementing a full-scale

parser will not only correct coloring bugs but will increase editor speed when combined with caching.

To be short, an overall list of bugs and requirements complement itself and shows the direction. I’m not

sure about cross-browser and don’t really care about it. FireFox is definitely enough to build up an

IDE.

#9

At first, I just feel so weird hearing web-based IDE~

Unfortunately I can’t test at the given link because my firefox version is 5

#10

I like the editor. Its small and simple. It surely needs some further improvments but it contains the first basic features and I really would like to see where this is going.