FusionEdit M

[et1337]

Due to the myriad discussions about IDEs and whatnot here at CD, FusionEdit is back this year! And now it’s on the INTERWEBS!

For those who remember/used FusionEdit last year (you poor, poor creatures), please don’t hate me. It’ll be better this year, promise.

For those who don’t know what it is:

FusionEdit is an open source collaborative IDE designed for the FIRST Robotics competition.

FusionEdit is moving out of the cozy world of desktop .NET applications and into the wild untamed world of prototype Ajax web applications. Built completely on PHP, MySQL, Javascript + XML, and some hopefully valid XHTML 1.0, FusionEdit M currently targets Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. It’s also been tested in Opera and Safari 3 Public Beta, but it’s buggy and slow. On the server side, FusionEdit runs out of the box on Apache or IIS, combined with PHP 5 and MySQL 5.

More information, download links, screenshots, and a feature tour are available at http://fusionedit.sourceforge.net.

As stated in the SourceForge article, I don’t have a live web demo up right now, but you can try the working copy on my development server (not guaranteed to be running all the time) over at http://emt.blogdns.com/fusionedit/. I strongly recommend Firefox or IE 7. Also note: file saving is not implemented yet. You have to commit a new revision. :o

Some ideas I would really like to implement by release:

• Better versioning.
  Right now, each file has its own revision history; there’s no correlation of revisions between separate files.
• Better installation process.
  I’d like to somehow make it easier to install MCC18 on linux, mac, and windows, without violating the rules set forth by Microchip.
• Cross-platform hex loader.
  I envision a Java applet that grabs the hex file from the server and shoots it straight to the serial port. Alternatively, the user could just save the hex file to disk and load it in IFI Loader or whatever.
• Real-time editing.
  The idea is to let developers edit the same file simultaneously. It never worked well in the .NET version, so I’m making it more simple this time. The new system will only work line-by-line, and if another developer is in the middle of writing a new function, the compiler will simply ignore his changes until he saves. Even after he saves his changes, you will still have full control over which lines of code go to the compiler.

The bottom line: The main purpose of this post is to get other developers interested, so if you’d like to help out, please PM me and I’ll add you to the project. I’m shooting to release by the first or second week of the build season.

Comments and feedback are appreciated.

Thanks and happy Thanksgiving!

~et1337