Moodle in English: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

Hi Moodlers!
I'm Grady Laksmono, and I'm a student who will be working on the Moodle IDE project for Google Summer of Code 2008. In this thread, I would like to get some community feedbacks, suggestions, comments, or even ideas that you have that may help me during the development process. Overall, this IDE would be very much helpful for all of us

So please, let me know!

Thanks,
Grady

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by David Horat - Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 9:15 PM

Hi Grady. I am the one that proposed this project so I would gladly give out my feedback. A few points:

CVS: there were be several builds as there are already for the different Moodle versions. So you just have to use the same scripts to pack them with the IDE.
XAMPP plugin: there is already a plugin created for this task.
Chesktyle: create a checkstyle template that follows Moodle Design Guidelines.

I suggest you to take a look at my old Proof of Concept of this project:
http://mirrors.davidhorat.com/moodle/MoodleIDE-latest.zip

I am looking forward to see the results of this project fully integrated in Moodle.

Regards,
David

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Wednesday, May 7, 2008, 11:51 PM

Thank you David,
I've looked at the concept that you had, but for some reason XAMPP and Eclipse does not configured properly together, I played around with the PDT and I found out that PDT needs to have some host configuration to make it works with XAMPP's Apache...

- Grady

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Martin Dougiamas - Monday, May 12, 2008, 4:48 PM

It's OK if there is some manual configuration is required (although this should obviously be minimised). What can't be automated could be listed clearly in a README-SETUP.txt file. (Just so you don't get too stressed about automating everything 100%).

(On the other points I agree with what David and Gary are saying).

My environment is still vim+firefox so I hope you can come up with something that may finally tempt me over to a GUI.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Monday, May 12, 2008, 5:51 PM

Thanks Martin for your input. I'm actually quite surprised that you use VIM to do a huge chunk of codes

, not even emacs?

I'll make sure that I get everyone actually use it wink

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Marcus Green - Monday, May 12, 2008, 11:12 PM

Are you suggesting that Emacs is better than VIM?. I have a feeling that Martin would probably use edlin if it still shipped with windows. Oh dear I have just checked and it DOES still ship with Windows (at least the Windows XP where I work).

I also vote for plenty of detail on getting the debugger to work. A collegue and I both spent a big chunk of an entire weekend independently trying to get it work. We succeeded in the end but only after an great deal of fiddling.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Monday, May 12, 2008, 11:29 PM

I'm not suggesting that Emacs is better than Vim, I'd often use Quanta Web Development

Thanks for your input and comment!

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Marcus Green - Monday, May 12, 2008, 11:44 PM

I was just teasing because it is such an old favorite for flame wars (Grins). My favorite feature about VIM is "its always there", on any Un*x box (which is nice). Your work on the IDE is greatly appreciated.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 8:19 AM

I personally never wrote the whole software using the console based vim, at least I use the GUI one so that it colors my code so that it looks pretty :P

As far as the console though, I personally tend to use nano or pico more often ;)

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 7:03 PM

As for coloring all Vi(M) needs is ":syntax on"

Since we are at this OT, at least something recent: Linux Journal Reader's Choice Awards 2008 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10065 "Favorite Text Editor vi (35.3%)".

Also "Favorite Scripting Language Python (28.9%), Honorable Mentions PHP (21.7%), bash (19.8%), Perl (17%)"

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Marcus Green - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 7:52 PM

I had the misfortune to spend 6 months of my life programming Perl. I came to the conclusion it was just a slightly organised version of line noise.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Robert Allerstorfer - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 8:45 PM

Marcus,

Perl is a programming language for Perl geeks, and Java is for Java programmers. I am part of the first group and you of the second one, but please have some respect to the Perl world.

Respect & peace!

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Martin Dougiamas - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 10:47 AM

edlin, never. I was using Unix and VMS long before I used DOS!

Vim and Unix are hard to beat speed-wise. They are like a stripped-down racing car compared to most IDEs which to me feel like driving a Mercedes Bus.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by David Mudrák - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 3:04 AM

Why surprised? I am pretty sure there was more than a lot of top quality software written in VIM. And, to be honest, any IDE that does not support VIM as embedded editor gets -100 in my eyes.
I do not want to start a flame war black eye

- please do not reply to this post tongueout

:wq

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Gary Anderson - Thursday, May 8, 2008, 9:53 PM

Hi Grady:

One of the most important things is to get the debugger working correctly. This is a somewhat complicated process with xdebug and the zend debugger, but that would make the IDE project quite valuable.

In addition to CVS is Git and SVN. While neither are used directly with Moodle today, integration in the IDE would give more options down the road.

--Gary

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by David Horat - Friday, May 9, 2008, 10:51 PM

I agree. Specially the debugger part with good Usage Guidelines.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Saturday, May 10, 2008, 2:30 AM

Hi Gary,
Thanks for your input. I'm going to take a look at the debugger part. xdebug and zend debugger could be integrated with Eclipse already..

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 1:31 PM

By the way, as far as the debugger, what is the differences between xdebug and zend debugger? What are the advantages of one over the other? In your personal opinion, which one do you prefer to use in the Moodle development environment? Why?

Thanks,
Grady

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 3:17 PM

Thank you Grady for this thread.
I am the last developer of moodle.
My opinion is quite not relevant at all.
Every time I find a lot of difficulties in developing moodle.
What I really feel missing are three features:

the trace
the immediate evaluation of a variable (the command window to ask for variable values)
the output with the list of globals and local variables value

I have never seen a working, ready to install and use, php IDE (eclipse IDE... even with the great tutorial from Tim Hunt... was never been working, on my local MAC installation)

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 4:10 PM

It seems like the features that you're looking is going to be mostly be implemented in the debugger mode, but I'm not sure with what do you mean by:

"the immediate evaluation of a variable (the command window to ask for variable values)"

Is it like tracing variable?

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Marcus Green - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 4:36 PM

I suspect he means the thing you can do in Visual Basic where you can do something like
?2 * 10

and it outputs 20. Or possibly he was referring to the idea of asking for the current value of a variable when the programm is stopped in the debugger, which I believe is supported by the debugger.

And back to Martins comment, how come other Operating systems didn't see the idea of file versioning (a la VMS) and say "this is good, we must incorporate it).....

I think the availability of a pre-configured IDE with the application could make it far easier to get people involved in Moodle development. In fact more work on the Meta side of Moodle dev could have create a lot of opportunaties for people to get involved. Now back to my day job as Java programmer.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 8:54 PM

Yes, you are both correct.
Sorry, I left my desk for 4 hours for a meeting.
Thank you.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Bruce Webster - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 12:28 PM

I think you're looking for the ZendDebugger PHP extension for intel macs (darwin universal build). After much effort I found it here:
http://downloads.zend.com/pdt/server-debugger/

It works with PHP 4.3.x to 5.2.x. Putting in the one line in my php.ini file that the readme described got it working no problem for me (I have PHP 5.2.1 from entropy.ch on OSX 10.4.11, iMac 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo). I'm not sure if it works on 64-bit builds of PHP as come on Mac Pros.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 1:00 PM

Do you know which one that is used in the all-in-one version? I'm thinking to just start off with the Eclipse PDT All-in-One with the Zend Debugger:

http://downloads.zend.com/pdt/all-in-one/

Also, what is the difference between the Zend server-debugger and the debugger?

http://downloads.zend.com/pdt/

Why do you want to use one over the other for Moodle project?

Also, as far as the CVS, what type of CVS functionalities do you guys want to be integrated as part of the Eclipse plug-in?

I personally don't see the point of "automatically packing" the newest Moodle version to the project every time, because first of all, not everyone want to use the latest Moodle version, and secondly, someone might not even want to have it packed into their project as it would take some loading time. Please let me know what do you guys think?

Thanks!

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 2:19 PM

I believe that a separate package would be nice.
Updated only when needed and downloaded only from who desire it.
More or less what already is done with the moodle packages like http://download.moodle.org/macosx/ or http://download.moodle.org/windows/

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 3:52 PM

Thanks Danielle,
I'm also looking forward to the others feedbacks approve

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Scott Karren - Friday, May 16, 2008, 7:04 AM

Grady

If you want the perspective of a novice developer, I would be happy to participate. I have used Moodle for a number of years and am just now deciding to take the plunge to try and develop some customizations for my company. When you have an Alpha product I would be very interested in testing it for you.

Scott Karren

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Friday, May 16, 2008, 10:58 AM

Thanks Scott,
But I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do this.. I'm going to ask mentor if it's ok to release beta version so that I can get more feedbacks..

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Tim Hunt - Friday, May 16, 2008, 5:49 PM

Releasing early versions sounds like a very good idea. "Release early, release often" is part of the open source philosophy. I'm sure your mentors will agree.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Saturday, May 17, 2008, 3:48 AM

I've asked my Mentor, and as you said, they agreed. So, first deadline is hopefully I could release the first beta version on May 26, 2008..

Thanks all for your supports!

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Scott Karren - Saturday, May 17, 2008, 12:12 AM

No problem, if not let me know if I can help other ways. Also is there a good primer on Eclipse that someone could recommend. I have it installed but as has been said in other posts it is a big app with lots of options.

Scott Karren

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Tim Hunt - Saturday, May 17, 2008, 12:42 AM

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Eclipse - although that really needs to be update for Eclipse 3.3, still, it is pretty accurate.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 1:19 PM

Thank you Bruce
I will try to follow your instruction as soon as possible.
Am I getting out from the tunnel?
Thank you again.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Tuesday, May 13, 2008, 11:15 PM

On the same topic,
what may be very useful
is the xreference between functions and their definition as it is, for instance, here.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 1:04 PM

Thanks, I'll integrate that as part of the plug-ins, but do you know if there's a CVS for this or something? Who are maintaining it?

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Daniele Cordella - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 1:25 PM

Thanks to you Grady.
No, I have no idea about CVS and maintainers but I am sure that all the big names of moodle know the answer.

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Wednesday, May 14, 2008, 2:04 PM

Thanks Daniele,
I'll double check with them

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Re: Moodle IDE: Community Feedbacks

by Grady Laksmono - Friday, May 23, 2008, 11:13 AM

Hi everyone!
Thank you for all of your supports, I spoke with my Mentor yesterday regarding the implementation that I've had in mind. There are two solutions that I made with the differences of the steps that is made by the developers to create a Moodle project, and more control that we have over the overall eclipse plug-in. So, we agreed with that solution, but I have to delay the beta release date to Monday, June 16, 2008 (or less). That will allow me to focus on coding for about 1 week + my break time.

Please be kind because I'm in the weird quarter system, and am going to have final exams on June 2 - 7

Thanks all, please check out Moodle IDE project page to look up the updates and changes that I made.. Cheers

Grady

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