A question about the path of xinha development

KingMoore · 2005-06-09 15:37:02

Hi!

First off I use an older version of xinha, and for the most part it is great. I appreciate everyone who helps contribute and develop.

I am wondering though... there still is no official release. It seems like with each nightly build the package size gets larger and larger, and the app itself adds new plugins, new graphics, new skins, new bells and whistles.

It seems like rather than adding all this stuff, it would make more sense to get a good, solid, bugfree, basic official release, then worry about adding continual bells and whistles later?

Thoughts?

EDITED TO ADD:

i know for a lot of people like me, having a lightweight, bugfree editor is as important as having one with a cutting edge look or packed with functionality.

Last edited by KingMoore (2005-06-09 15:47:18)

mharrisonline · 2005-06-09 22:28:23

I think that is the purpose of version 1...

I have found that you can safely lose close to half the size of html.js simply by crunching it (which only removes comments, whitespace, and line breaks, as opposed to true compression which sometimes breaks things). Some of the other js files also "lose the fat" quite nicely when crunched. It is a really good idea to crunch at least htmlarea.js, and possibly a few other js files before putting it out there for your users. It loads much faster. Part of the reason the application is so big is because the js files are formatted for readability and commented for other developers.

I think also that most users wouldn't use every plugin at once, but just select the ones that would be relevant to their specific users.

Yermo · 2005-06-09 22:37:50

KingMoore wrote:

Hi!
First off I use an older version of xinha, and for the most part it is great. I appreciate everyone who helps contribute and develop.
I am wondering though... there still is no official release. It seems like with each nightly build the package size gets larger and larger, and the app itself adds new plugins, new graphics, new skins, new bells and whistles.
It seems like rather than adding all this stuff, it would make more sense to get a good, solid, bugfree, basic official release, then worry about adding continual bells and whistles later?
Thoughts?
EDITED TO ADD:
i know for a lot of people like me, having a lightweight, bugfree editor is as important as having one with a cutting edge look or packed with functionality.

This is one of the big reasons I ended up forking Xinha.

http://www.areaedit.com

Current version is 0.4.1. I'll be putting together a 0.4.2 build with alot of bug fixes soon.

Development on areaedit is /alot/ slower than on Xinha. I'm only fixing bugs in a very core set of plugins. The primary focus in on maintainability and getting what's there to work ... improving comments, adding debug messages, adding much better error messages, catching and handling more exceptions, etc. ... as such maybe it should be called the boring fork of Xinha. My focus is on PHP as a backend language; if you use another language some work will need to be done but it's not prohibitive.

In Xinha, if you remove most of the plugins Xinha becomes alot more stable. Stylist caused me alot of problems so I don't use it. EnterParagraphs is a disaster. (change mozParaHandler in htmlarea.js to "built-in" to get much better behavior).

gogo · 2005-06-10 03:19:38

As Yermo said, if you want stability and smaller footprint then AreaEdit is for you. If you want bleeding edge, all hell might break loose, use at your own risk, but with more cool stuff, then Xinha is the ticket.

Xinha is (loosly) in feature-lock now, no new features that have not already been slated for inclusion in V1.0 should be added. You can see the tikets open before V1.0 can be released at http://xinha.python-hosting.com/report/10

V1.0 is about getting a solid base from which we can work, at the moment it's all a bit squishy. Once V1.0 is complete then we will begin stripping, reorganising and generally changing stuff for the better to make V2.0 (which probably won't have many new features, but will be somewhat incompatable with 1.0). Once V2.0 is complete then we can start putting new features in on our new flash much smaller and faster code base.

kimss · 2005-06-10 13:30:14

Hmm... Today is 10 June, what Im wondering about is the following :
How "safe" is it for me to use Xinha in out CMS with the present version? Is it recommended, or is what you are saying that we should stay away from Xinha for say 1/2 year or so and look it up again? I use a version of Xinha in our CMS today, from 12 Mai. This is as far as I can see stable enough, I havnt gotten any feedbacks of anything else that is. However I agree with KingMoore, I think the last weeks much have been altered and quite a few changes has been made - and I would like an opinion from gogo and niko what they think of the latest edition (present day).

Is it "OK" to utilize it, and if not why not? (Im not looking for a page of points, rather a few notes if there are some major factors why I should be careful with using the present build).

One could ofcourse also say : is Xinha today more / less stable than the latest HtmlArea from Sourceforge? (Since I have used that one in production earlier).

On the other hand, I think Xinha is a great editor, and I really appretiate that people continue the work with it!

kimss · 2005-06-10 15:14:41

Well, someone has to represent the latest version anyways so I desided to upgrade our CMS with the latest Xinha after all, I guess its as stable as it can be at the moment. I'll be doing some final checking tonight and roll it out during the weekend for our customers.

As a side note I see the main developer for FCKeditor finally got some nice sponsor money for a new Mac, who will win this race, I was in the opinion that some if theese editors already worked on Mac but it seems I was very wrong. Surprisingly the funding for this Mac went in lightening speed, people can contribute after all! Ok - major sidenote there,

Chris Allison · 2005-06-10 19:50:53

kimss wrote:

I was in the opinion that some if theese editors already worked on Mac but it seems I was very wrong.

Xinha and others probably do run on a Mac as long as you are running Firefox/Mozilla on the Mac and not Safari.

gogo · 2005-06-10 20:51:13

Using Xinha in your production environment is perfectly safe AS LONG AS YOU TEST IT AND ARE HAPPY WITH THE VERSION YOU USE.

Don't just blindly upgrade and put it in a production system without testing, because things will break from time to time.

gogo · 2005-06-10 20:54:31

Xinha works fine in a gecko based browser on a mac (mozilla, firefox, camino). It does not yet work in Safari. If somebody wants to take that on, or donate a mac mini, feel free ;-)

mitchenall · 2005-06-13 09:04:30

Didn't Apple put the contenteditable changes in Safari back into KHTML?

niko · 2005-06-13 09:22:07

no, safari uses WebKit (WebCore) which is a fork from KHTML
and its relatively hard for the KHTML-developers to implement the patches they get from apple (see http://dot.kde.org/1116349882/)
but recently apple opened their cvs and bugzilla (http://dot.kde.org/1118138374/) so we hopefully will see some results

gogo · 2005-06-13 11:26:06

KHTML developers recently backported some stuff such that konq can now also pass the acid-2 test for CSS. But that does not include the contenteditable stuff. I havn't used KDE in a long time (and don't have it installed any more) so if somebody sees them come up with contenteditable be sure and post here so I know to go have a look.

mtmosier · 2005-06-13 11:38:54

Anyone know how useful (if at all) this project is for testing safari compatibility?

http://gtk-webcore.sourceforge.net/

ianb · 2005-06-13 12:19:37

Incidentally, we're using Xinha in an app, and soon a CMS. Every so often I update, then we test some, then lately we've been reverting again So we're still stuck at r179, which seems to be working well enough. One of these days an attempted update will probably coincide with a solid snapshot again, and we'll go to another revision. It works well enough.

KingMoore · 2005-06-13 13:58:44

thanks for all the feedback so far. i had looked into the areaedit option at one point, and it just seemed like it wouldn't be getting enough support/future development to justify me going that way over xinha. i really don't want to move to a whole new editor...

we too have a CMS. we started using some other editor, then i moved to htmlarea which was good for the most part but had a few bugs, then moved to xinha in hopes they would be fixed, many were but now there's new ones. i guess i will just keep waiting for v1 to come out.

Chris Allison · 2005-06-13 14:35:47

By the way, good work on the progress of Xinha. I have only come by here a couple of times in the last couple of months. I came by here one time in May and everything seemed to be down (probably just server problems) and there wasn't any news added since March, so I assumed that the progress of this project had died out. I was happily surprised the other day when I came by and tried out the latest nightly example. It looks like you all have completed a lot of updates. As others have expressed, hopefully we can eventually get a stable release sometime. Thanks!

willeffects · 2005-06-13 15:36:23

Gogo,

I looked at the bug fixes for 1.0, but it seems in the last few weeks there have been many new features added that have added new bugs. How can we insure the feature set is really locked and that only bug fixes are submitted at this point?

Thanks for all your efforts.

Will

gogo · 2005-06-13 22:35:12

What you are mostly seeing is new plugins being added. That's fine, plugins do not affect the core and are not considered a feature.

As for adding features to the core, this is to be avoided. The tickets open for V1.0 is the only work that should be going into the core.

willeffects · 2005-06-13 22:36:20

But all of the new bugs i've found were without plugins loaded... so they must have been in core.

Last edited by willeffects (2005-06-13 23:23:57)

niko · 2005-06-16 05:12:02

on contenteditable-support for KHML look here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.kfm/8696

...looks like we have to wait for kde 4

gogo · 2005-06-16 09:12:09

willeffects wrote:

But all of the new bugs i've found were without plugins loaded... so they must have been in core.

Two reasons..
1. sometimes fixing bugs causes, or simply exposes other bugs
2. recently some changes were introduced into the trunk without discussing them properly first, currently the only remaining bug from these is http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/337 . At this stage I am awaiting to see if somebody will fix this problem, if nobody does I might look at it to see if it's an easy fix, or will rollback the changes mentioned in http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/329 I have discussed this with the developer in question and hopefully we won't see new core features introduced without discussion in future.

willeffects · 2005-06-16 16:16:55

gogo wrote:

Two reasons..
1. sometimes fixing bugs causes, or simply exposes other bugs
2. recently some changes were introduced into the trunk without discussing them properly first, currently the only remaining bug from these is http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/337 . At this stage I am awaiting to see if somebody will fix this problem, if nobody does I might look at it to see if it's an easy fix, or will rollback the changes mentioned in http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/329 I have discussed this with the developer in question and hopefully we won't see new core features introduced without discussion in future.

I was specifically refering to at least this bug: http://xinha.python-hosting.com/ticket/327 . It looks like some of the others have been fixed now. Good job.

gogo · 2005-06-16 21:07:42

Like I said, fixing bugs sometimes makes bugs.

Like we always say.. patches welcome.

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