OCWebEditor Project

Last Updated on Monday, 22 November 2010 07:07 Written by aoirthoir Thursday, 18 November 2010 11:36

OCWebEditor is now available for alpha testing.

Head on over and check it out.  Don’t forget to read more info here about it.

OCWebEditor ver. .01 Alpha

The intention of this project is to provide an on-line Editor/Compiler/Debugger for OpenCOBOL.  The idea was arrived at looking at Gary Cutlers OCic.  I thought that was a wonderful idea and I created a very simple front-end for the compiler on the web.  During the iterations of edit/upload/compile/test I was getting more and more frustrated with all the switching from one app to another.

That was when I decided I needed a full COBOL IDE with the ability to compile right there on the web. Thus the OCWebEditor was born.

The OCWebEditor will be done in a few phases. Following is the current roadmap for this project.

Once Add1to has the project management up and running I will load the source into it.

PHASE 1: (Current)

• Editor Plug-in
  • Rather than struggle with creating my own editor plug-in I used the awesome power of the web and FOSS. I went and found one that was already working. (Why re-invent the wheel). The current Plug-in is EditArea by Christophe Dolivet. It beats out many of the other FOSS editors in that it works, lot’s of built-in functionality, being supported, and most important, WELL documented.
  • Current features of EditArea:
    • Easy to integrate, only one script include and one function call
    • Tabulation support (allow to write well formated source code)
    • Customizable real-time syntax highlighting (currently: PHP, CSS, Javascript, Python, HTML, XML, VB, C, CPP, SQL, Pascal, Basic, Brainf*ck, and probably more…)
      • IMPORTANT TO NOTE. THE ONLY SYNTAX HIGHLIGHTING IS FOR OpenCOBOL at this time.
    • Word-wrap support : I DISABLED THIS
    • Search and replace (with regexp)
    • Auto-indenting new lines : NOT USED
    • Line numerotation
    • Multilanguage support (currently: Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and probably more…)
      • NOTE: I NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THIS USEABLE ON THE FLY
    • Possible PHP gzip compression (compress the core files to one file of ~25Ko)
    • Allow multiple instances
    • Full screen mode
    • Possible plugin integration
    • Possible save and load callback functions
    • Possible dynamic content management
    • Can work in the same environment than “prototype” and “mootools”‘s like libraries.
• Single-User design
  • Currently I am just getting it to work. Plain and simple. This means it is designed around a single-user. So, once I put it into Alpha availability you will be able to use it, but will share it with all users. This means your code will be available to everyone using it.
• Compiler
  • The compiler will be usuable with manual addition of parameters. Meaning you will be able supply any compiler switch you need for compiling. e.g -Wall -x etc…
  • All output from the compiler will be dumped to the “console” and “log” tab of the UI.
    • In order to achieve this I had to redirect the console output to .log and .err files then read them back and display them for the cgi output. Apparently the compiler does not send to stdout.
• Load
  • You will be able to load the source into the editor by clicking on the filename in the file list.
  • You will be able to load multiple files into the editor
• Save
  • You will be able to save any changes made to the code in the current source tab.
• New Source
  • You will be able to create a new source file which will load a template designed for CGI
• SaveAs
  • You will be able to save the current source tab AS <filename.cob>
• Run
  • You will be able to run the current source tab (AFTER COMPILING IT) and see the output in the console tab.

Phase II

• Multi-User
  • Ability to have your own work-space/projects
• Source and Library
  • Have both a source folder and library (copy books) folder
• Per user configuration
  • Ability to configure default compiler and project settings
• Download source files
• Upload source files instead of copy/paste/save_as

Phase III

• svn integration
• debugger (curtesy of Frederico)
• TBD

This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

1 Comment

1. aoirthoir   |  Friday, 19 November 2010 at 12:02 am

   HOLY OCEDTIOR BATMAN!

   Damon, you’re about to convert me to an all web based IDE, and I don;t mean just for OC.

   Praises!