Re: [xwiki-devs] [Proposal] New GWT-based WYSIWYG editor

Hi, I was thinking that having a GWT based editor has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. Pro: - We don't need to duplicate (or triplicate) the rendering code, as the TinyMCE based editor almost reimplemented Radeox in Javascript, just that in an ugly manner. The regular expression for rendering headings, for example, had to be written once in the resource files, for Radeox, once in Javascript for transforming wiki markup to html, and once in Javascript to transform html back into wiki markup. - We write only one plain old Java code, but it works and looks the same across most browser, since GWT handles the differences - No problems with popup blockers, since GWT uses internal frames (afaik) - We can write nice clean code on the server side, since it is Java. With JS it takes a lot more effort to write nice code, especially when you have to deal with all the browser bugs and differences in behavior. - With a little more effort, we should be able to make real-time collaborative editing possible. No more edit locks, no more edit conflicts. Con: - Editing a document will create a lot of connections to the server, since it is Ajax based. How well does it scale? Ludovic should be able to tell from the Curriki experiences, and Curriki is a large scale test platform for GWT on XWiki. We could reduce this problem by making the code less dependent on server processing, if that's possible. - We don't control the generated javascript/html anymore, so we can say goodbye to xhtml-validity, accessibility, standards compliance. - It was said that the current editor takes a lot to start. Will there really be a sensitive speedup when we'll use GWT? I don't think so, actually it could be worse for small documents. Indeed, the current editor has an O(e^(size)) loading time, while the GWT editor will (hopefully) have a linear loading time, but for small sizes I'm not sure it will be better. I had some bad experiences with some GWT interfaces in Curriki. We'll have to try it and see how it goes. Moreover, I'm sure that the tinyMCE regular expressions could be optimized to reduce the loading time. So, my major reasons why I'd go for the new editor is that we don't need to duplicate code anymore, and we don't need to deal with browser differences/bugs. But I think that the major showstopper is the performance issue. Ludovic, how well does GWT work? How much stress does it put on the server? How does the server load change with GWT? On 9/10/07, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: Sergiu -- http://purl.org/net/sergiu