[stringtemplate-interest] visualizer mockup

[Terence Parr]

Hi Guys,

Yeah, this could be pretty sweet.

I think Gerald is saying that the development environments already have the basic infrastructure. I believe that eclipse can even strip itself down to be just the fancy text displayed or talking about.  Of course, then I have to learn SWT, which only works when I'm doing eclipse crap. ;)  I suppose I could look at Intellij and see how they do it and then replicated in my own tool.

In Java at least, we can also do this fancy thing where I can tell you where in the source code you set a particular attribute. All I do is override ST to reimplement add(); it creates an exception and asks it who just called add(); then I store that along with the attribute in the attribute table. later, we can look this up and when you click on an attribute's source link, it could open that file for you to show you the Java code that set that value. cool, n'est-ce pas?

Ter
On Nov 23, 2009, at 4:13 PM, Sam Harwell wrote:

> Hi Gerald,
> 
> I think you have the wrong idea on what this is. The problem template
> coders always run into, regardless of which IDE they use to edit
> templates, is understanding how the output ties to the templates. In
> essence, we're talking about a specialized debugger that operates very
> much unlike other debuggers.
> 
> I'll talk about this in regards to HTML output, but it wouldn't
> necessarily be HTML. Instead of outputting "plain text" from rendering a
> template, it would output an HTML-formatted annotated string. One pane
> could show the text that was output, but if you hover over text in it,
> another pane would show you the template rendering stack at the time
> that text was written along with information about the object(s)
> involved in rendering. Additional possibilities might include a pane
> where you can select a template and have it highlight all text it
> directly and/or indirectly generated.
> 
> There's no real requirement that this be tied to a particular IDE, and
> I'm not convinced an IDE has much to offer regarding this particular
> feature.
> 
> Sam
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stringtemplate-interest-bounces at antlr.org
> [mailto:stringtemplate-interest-bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Gerald
> Rosenberg
> Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 2:22 PM
> To: Terence Parr
> Cc: StringTemplate Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [stringtemplate-interest] visualizer mockup
> 
> At 10:35 AM 11/23/2009, Terence Parr wrote:
>> Hiya...ST v3 has a nice XML tagged output that shows which template
> generated which output. I'd like an interactive thing that's easier to
> read for ST v4  I'm including a mockup.
>> 
>> It starts with a window with the generated output.  As I mouse over a
> section generated by a template, it highlights (one at a time) with a
> box or whatever.  I can collapse output for any expression/template.  If
> I hit "get info" key it would pop up a dialog showing the template
> pattern and the attribute table (an inspector).  It seems like I'd need
> to detect mouse movement over a textpane and then expand and collapse
> sections (hopefully w/o having to do much; perhaps replace the char
> sequence with a new "collapse icon"). 
> 
> And here I thought you were a tools kinda guy; you know, pick the best
> tool for the job and build on it.  Thinking of doing this stuff from
> scratch is so 1999.  ;)
> 
> All of the major tools platforms (Eclipse for certain, NetBeans,
> Intellij I believe) give you all of what you are asking for largely for
> free: code folding, code assist, templates, code completion, and more.
> Actually, a fair bit is already implemented in AntlrDT's string template
> editor* -- just need to burnish the code assist adaptor and template
> hierarchy visitor a bit to do the lookups.
> 
> If you are willing to go with a platform -- and there is really no
> credible reason not to** -- just pick one as none would be a wrong
> choice.  Even if all you want is the visualization part, without any
> editor or project support, Eclipse can be stripped down to provide just
> the essentials.
> 
> If you go with Eclipse, I can certainly contribute.
> 
> Best,
> Gerald
> 
> ---------
> * at least 90% is the existing Eclipse platform implementation 
> ** they even have vi and emacs bindings for the old school hard-cores
> 
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