[mashup-dev] Mashup editor prototype.

[Sanjiva Weerawarana]

I tried this and it looks good (I was reinstalling someone's machine and 
had a windows box around!). I definitely agree this kind of "template" 
editor will be very useful for developers as it makes the extra bits first 
class (as you've noted too).

I too am in your camp of not being convinced by fancy graphical 
pointy/clicky UIs for programming mashups (which are service 
compositions). We identified a specific target audience: Javascript 
developers. I don't think we need to shy away from that. Google may indeed 
be right that there's a larger intermediate group between our target and 
Yahoo! Pipes target audience which can be reached via an XML syntax. We 
can look at that later ... and it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a 
few tags to do most of our features.

Sanjiva.

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.
> 
>  
> 
> For instance, right now the parameter types are exposed as a drop down 
> of some built-in schema types,  but I could imagine extending this to 
> simple custom types like enumerations and facets such as length and 
> pattern.  I can imagine extending the documentation annotation to a rich 
> text editor, making it easy to use simple styling, add hyperlinks, and 
> so forth.
> 
>  
> 
> The page is at 
> http://wso2.org/repos/wso2/people/jonathan/mashup-editor.html (Sorry, IE 
> only at this point since it’s a mix of Javascript, HTML, XML, XSLT, and 
> XPath – a useful integrated environment only available in IE).
> 
>  
> 
> *Jonathan Marsh* - http://www.wso2.com - 
> http://auburnmarshes.spaces.live.com
> 
>  
> 
> 
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-- 
Sanjiva Weerawarana, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman & CEO; WSO2, Inc.; http://www.wso2.com/
email: sanjiva at wso2.com; cell: +94 77 787 6880; fax: +1 509 691 2000

"Oxygenating the Web Service Platform."