[mashup-dev] Mashup editor prototype.

[Ajith Ranabahu]

Hi Jonathan / all,
Please see my comments inline.
Jonathan Marsh wrote:
> I keep hearing from you all how important editing UIs are.  I’m still
> not sure I believe it – I think users move quickly from constrained UI
> to full text.  But to explore this a little further, I created a
> pre-prototype of an editor that structures the javascript source into
> function blocks and global or local  annotations.  The annotations can
> then be edited in a more constrained fashion - in this case through a
> forms interface.  Such an interface makes the annotations more
> discoverable, and provides people help with creating high-quality
> annotations.  Yet the result can be fairly easily parsed from arbitrary
> user source, edited, and serialized back out as Javascript.
> 

I'm sure my (somewhat annoying) recent rain of long email on the Google
mashup editor has a part to play in this ;)  [Sorry - could not contain
my excitement :) ] Anyway this is cool and you can definitely push it
out as a tool once the details are figure out and a bit more 'makeup' added.

I agree to the fact that users move from a constrained UI to a full text
editing soon, given that the text equivalent is not horribly complex. In
fact I see people (like me) using the graphical mode and text mode
interactively in some cases [like in BPEL]. Till yesterday my view of a
mashup editor was a graphical tool with shapes and arrows [such as the
yahoo pipes interface] but now I understand that a well designed text
language can also be quite easy and may be more effective than its
graphical equivalent.

I did have a chance to chat with the Google people who made the mashup
editor and the first question I asked was why not graphical. They told me

1. People find it not so difficult to use an XMLish language, after
being exposed to something like HTML.

2. The targeted user group is not the most unsavvy computer users but
the users with a slight bit of computer know how and interest. In other
words my mother (who knows how to check mail and chat but literally
nothing else that can be done with a computer) may not be able to make a
mashup with it  but Sanjiva's 10 year old son (who probably knows a bit
of HTML) will:)

3. They may layer a graphical thing over it if there is enough interest
in the user community but right now there are no plans.

One other thing that I felt as  important during the presentations was
the fact that they were emphasizing 'without writing javascript'. I
guess that in this web 2.0 environment, Javascript is seen as a very
cool but somewhat a scary experience to the mostly HTML centric people.
In fact when you actually want a full fledged java script based
application that works across multiple browsers without a hitch, you can
hardly keep your sanity ! (Our WSAS admin client development team will
tell you more about it :)).

Based on that I'm suggesting a bit of improvement - basically two modes
for the editor. The 'normal' mode displays very little javascript (or
almost none). Instead it lets you use XML blocks that ultimately expands
to chunks of javascript. These xml blocks may have attributes that can
control some aspects of the expanded script. The 'expert' mode on the
other hand is a more techy version where you get more control over the
javascript. Note that expert mode is not a full text editor but more
like the tool that Jonathan just published.

Another suggestion from me is that if there are any plans of serious
Ajax development for this tool, this would be the right time to adapt a
framework like GWT or Flex. Both are opensource (well flex is not but
there is a very good chance that it'll be opensource soon) and I've
played with GWT  a bit and has a very good impression about it. I've
been told that flex is also very good.

Thanks

Ajith