Re: Developer's Tools (was Re: Archives and Web Site)

[Malonowa <malonowa@wanadoo.fr>]

Doug Loss wrote:

> I did a fair amount of research into this in October of last year.  Roman Suzi
> and I looked over most of the IDEs he mentioned a little later.  Here's my take
> on it all.
>
> I think a program to translate Visual Basic programs to something native to
> Linux would be a useful tool.  It would allow VB programs to be brought over
> without having to be re-written, and they could then be maintained and extended
> on Linux.  However, I don't think VB is widely used by educators in designing
> courseware (if I'm wrong, please correct me).  HyperCard used to be the program
> of choice for such things, and now I believe it's HyperStudio.
>

I think that translation of tools like VB would be very difficult these things are hooked
heavily into windows. It's not just the language you'd have to translate, you'd have to
port all those dlls and other libraries.

> The closest thing to those currently available on Linux is MetaCard
> <http://www.metacard.com>, a commercial product.  It looks quite useful, and
> they have reasonable educational prices.
>
> Otherwise, I kind of like Visual TCL.  It's interface may still be a bit too
> difficult for the general user, but since it's written entirely in Tcl/Tk it
> should be readily modifiable.  I spoke with Stewart Allen (the leader of Visual
> TCL) last year about making an alternative, more-HyperStudio-like interface for
> vtcl, and he was willing to open the CVS tree for such work so long as it was
> GPLed.
>
>

COOL. Visual TCL - that's the way to go. TCL needs extensions for multimedia.

> As to the HTML for the prospective project, you can easily generate a template
> by saving the page and editing the text out from between the HTML tags.  You
> could then just put in the appropriate text and you'll then have an HTML
> version of your text.  If Wil is using Doc Welder to generate the page, you
> should be able to have your info smoothly added by putting it in the form
> mentioned in <http://www.seul.org/edu/projectpage.faq.html> and sending it to
> him.  That's assuming he's using the same source file format for the ToDo page
> that he does for the Projects page.
>

If you're doing HTML, Netscape Communicator has Composer.

Roman.