enterprise apps and the need for a business editor - Software-Eng

Timasmith wrote:
> It seems inevitable with a great many enterprise applications that a
> specialized document editor is required. Often to replace a standalone
> process which utilizes say Microsoft Word.
>
> Suppose I need to have a document editor in which the user can utilize
> templates and insert business data directly from other areas of the
> application. One goal is to reduce typing by smart use of shortcuts to
> content or data. The end goal is to produce a document which may be
> further edited by others or etched in stone.
>
> The problem is that users, being used to WYSIWYG, expect the ability to
> have all the power of MS Word integrated into the editor and yet as
> developers we want the seperation of content and formatting, and in my
> case it must run in Swing on both unix and windows platforms.
>
> What to do? I perused various packages from JEdit to various HTML
> editors. It doesnt look like there is anything suitable, most (like
> JEdit) work with raw text markup and that is not acceptable for most
> business users. The others produce HTML with various degress of
> success - but then you lose any possible structured content.
>
> So lets suppose we start from scratch. I dont have the time or
> resources to do a fully fledged XML/XSLT WYSWYG editor, not sure I
> could if I tried. Instead I am looking for a workaround that meets my
> needs.
>
> One thought is have the user work on a section at a time with a plain
> text editor. I could store the text blocks as discreet chunks in the
> database and dynamically lay out controls on the 'form' as it is
> generated. Any paragraph (or selected text) could be broken into a
> chunk for editing in an editor pane with properties such as 'heading 1,
> heading 2, colors etc' available. As the user leaves a block so it is
> displayed as a label. This has some advantages as it would be a real
> control allowing double clicking, right clicking and various forms of
> manipulation. I am not sure but think this might be easier to code
> than a straight text editor?
>
> There must be many strategies, some Swing specific perhaps but it is a
> general design issue.
>

Maybe iText is something for you, representing pdf to the user(s). But
then again maybe it is not since you already tried web pages. It's
definatly worth trying though.

http://www.lowagie.com/iText/

Responding to Timasmith...

> It seems inevitable with a great many enterprise applications that a
> specialized document editor is required. Often to replace a standalone
> process which utilizes say Microsoft Word.
>
> Suppose I need to have a document editor in which the user can utilize
> templates and insert business data directly from other areas of the
> application. One goal is to reduce typing by smart use of shortcuts to
> content or data. The end goal is to produce a document which may be
> further edited by others or etched in stone.
>
> The problem is that users, being used to WYSIWYG, expect the ability to
> have all the power of MS Word integrated into the editor and yet as
> developers we want the seperation of content and formatting, and in my
> case it must run in Swing on both unix and windows platforms.
>
> What to do? I perused various packages from JEdit to various HTML
> editors. It doesnt look like there is anything suitable, most (like
> JEdit) work with raw text markup and that is not acceptable for most
> business users. The others produce HTML with various degress of
> success - but then you lose any possible structured content.

Interoperability has been a buzzword since the early '90s. For example,
translation tools routinely produce system documentation directly in MS
Word (which includes diagrams, tables, etc.) and allow the user to
interactively edit AAL from their choice of editor within the
translation IDE. So long as the IMPORT facility is interoperable, you
should be able to do what you want. Round-trip tools routinely invoke
the user's choice of LSE from within the IDE than is interoperable with
version control systems and whatnot (i.e., the "data" just happens to be
source code fragments). I have also worked with applications where
interactive hierarchical displays were part of the application UI and
Windows Explorer was the underlying engine. IOW, I've got to believe
that there are editors around with programmatic interfaces and I would
do a bit more googling.


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> What to do? I perused various packages from JEdit to various HTML
> editors. It doesnt look like there is anything suitable, most (like
> JEdit) work with raw text markup and that is not acceptable for most
> business users. The others produce HTML with various degress of
> success - but then you lose any possible structured content.

Still a surprisingly thorny issue this one. When we needed a rich text
editor five years ago in a VB6 app, we ended up using IE in edit mode for
some simple editing and then shelling to FrontPage for more complex editing.
Hardly ideal.

Since then, the web based editors used by systems like Google Mail have come
on leaps and bounds but that's only after many years experience on
Javascript I'm guessing.

We've evaluated TX Text Control (http://www.textcontrol.com/) and kept an
eye on it over the years and it's certainly got a lot of features. Might be
worth checking out.

On a similar vein, how's the area around complex document formatting
looking? For the same package, we ended up wrestling with Microsoft Word to
generate complex documents (with complex page headers/footers etc) as there
was nothing much available in the 3rd party world.

Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?

Cheers, Rob.

On 21.12.2006 10:07 Rob wrote:

> Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?

What about OASIS OpenDocument?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

Thomas

Rob wrote:
> On a similar vein, how's the area around complex document formatting
> looking? For the same package, we ended up wrestling with Microsoft Word to
> generate complex documents (with complex page headers/footers etc) as there
> was nothing much available in the 3rd party world.
>
> Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?
>

The words "standard", "XML", and "complex document" suggest to me things
like DocBook and Apache FOP. It seems to me there's a lot of non-WYSIWYG
DocBook toolchains and a handful of proprietary standalone Java
near-WYSIWYG editors (i.e. not based on users typing raw markup) like
XXE and oXygen.


However, Vex looks very interesting ...

"Vex is an editor for XML documents. The "visual" part comes from the
fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a
wordprocessor-like interface."

"Vex is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL),
meaning that it will always be free to use, modify, and re-distribute."

"The Vex editor widget is available as a pure Java, cross-platform
component with bindings to Swing and SWT. Developers can re-use this
widget, for example as an applet in a web-based application."

http://vex.sourceforge.net/

Ian Wilson wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> > On a similar vein, how's the area around complex document formatting
> > looking? For the same package, we ended up wrestling with Microsoft Word to
> > generate complex documents (with complex page headers/footers etc) as there
> > was nothing much available in the 3rd party world.
> >
> > Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?
> >
>
> The words "standard", "XML", and "complex document" suggest to me things
> like DocBook and Apache FOP. It seems to me there's a lot of non-WYSIWYG
> DocBook toolchains and a handful of proprietary standalone Java
> near-WYSIWYG editors (i.e. not based on users typing raw markup) like
> XXE and oXygen.
>
>
> However, Vex looks very interesting ...
>
> "Vex is an editor for XML documents. The "visual" part comes from the
> fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a
> wordprocessor-like interface."
>
> "Vex is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL),
> meaning that it will always be free to use, modify, and re-distribute."
>
> "The Vex editor widget is available as a pure Java, cross-platform
> component with bindings to Swing and SWT. Developers can re-use this
> widget, for example as an applet in a web-based application."
>
> http://vex.sourceforge.net/

Nice find, that is *exactly* what I am looking for - essentially an
open source Word with structured documents. That could become very
popular, I'll check it out.

Thanks!

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 00:50:46 +0800, Timasmith wrote
(in article <1166374246.344555.126070{}t46g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>):

> It seems inevitable with a great many enterprise applications that a
> specialized document editor is required. Often to replace a standalone
> process which utilizes say Microsoft Word.
>
> Suppose I need to have a document editor in which the user can utilize
> templates and insert business data directly from other areas of the
> application. One goal is to reduce typing by smart use of shortcuts to
> content or data. The end goal is to produce a document which may be
> further edited by others or etched in stone.
>
> The problem is that users, being used to WYSIWYG, expect the ability to
> have all the power of MS Word integrated into the editor and yet as
> developers we want the seperation of content and formatting, and in my
> case it must run in Swing on both unix and windows platforms.
>
> What to do? I perused various packages from JEdit to various HTML
> editors. It doesnt look like there is anything suitable, most (like
> JEdit) work with raw text markup and that is not acceptable for most
> business users. The others produce HTML with various degress of
> success - but then you lose any possible structured content.
>
> So lets suppose we start from scratch. I dont have the time or
> resources to do a fully fledged XML/XSLT WYSWYG editor, not sure I
> could if I tried. Instead I am looking for a workaround that meets my
> needs.
>
> One thought is have the user work on a section at a time with a plain
> text editor. I could store the text blocks as discreet chunks in the
> database and dynamically lay out controls on the 'form' as it is
> generated. Any paragraph (or selected text) could be broken into a
> chunk for editing in an editor pane with properties such as 'heading 1,
> heading 2, colors etc' available. As the user leaves a block so it is
> displayed as a label. This has some advantages as it would be a real
> control allowing double clicking, right clicking and various forms of
> manipulation. I am not sure but think this might be easier to code
> than a straight text editor?
>
> There must be many strategies, some Swing specific perhaps but it is a
> general design issue.
>

yep same problem here.
I looked at form layout programs, where there are pre-defined forms that can
be read into a shell, then force the user to comply with the layout.

On Tue, 26 Dec 2006 04:12:38 +0800, Timasmith wrote
(in article <1167077557.968296.177700{}42g2000cwt.googlegroups.com>):

> Ian Wilson wrote:
>> Rob wrote:
>>> On a similar vein, how's the area around complex document formatting
>>> looking? For the same package, we ended up wrestling with Microsoft Word to
>>> generate complex documents (with complex page headers/footers etc) as there
>>> was nothing much available in the 3rd party world.
>>>
>>> Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?
>>>
>>
>> The words "standard", "XML", and "complex document" suggest to me things
>> like DocBook and Apache FOP. It seems to me there's a lot of non-WYSIWYG
>> DocBook toolchains and a handful of proprietary standalone Java
>> near-WYSIWYG editors (i.e. not based on users typing raw markup) like
>> XXE and oXygen.
>>
>>
>> However, Vex looks very interesting ...
>>
>> "Vex is an editor for XML documents. The "visual" part comes from the
>> fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a
>> wordprocessor-like interface."
>>
>> "Vex is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL),
>> meaning that it will always be free to use, modify, and re-distribute."
>>
>> "The Vex editor widget is available as a pure Java, cross-platform
>> component with bindings to Swing and SWT. Developers can re-use this
>> widget, for example as an applet in a web-based application."
>>
>> http://vex.sourceforge.net/
>
> Nice find, that is *exactly* what I am looking for - essentially an
> open source Word with structured documents. That could become very
> popular, I'll check it out.
>
> Thanks!
>

you might want to check it's size........
25MB is hardly small, for a java package, even if most of it is made up from
eclipse.

Steve

steve wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Dec 2006 04:12:38 +0800, Timasmith wrote
> (in article <1167077557.968296.177700{}42g2000cwt.googlegroups.com>):
>
> > Ian Wilson wrote:
> >> Rob wrote:
> >>> On a similar vein, how's the area around complex document formatting
> >>> looking? For the same package, we ended up wrestling with Microsoft Word to
> >>> generate complex documents (with complex page headers/footers etc) as there
> >>> was nothing much available in the 3rd party world.
> >>>
> >>> Is there a standard XML based document/page formatting scheme now?
> >>>
> >>
> >> The words "standard", "XML", and "complex document" suggest to me things
> >> like DocBook and Apache FOP. It seems to me there's a lot of non-WYSIWYG
> >> DocBook toolchains and a handful of proprietary standalone Java
> >> near-WYSIWYG editors (i.e. not based on users typing raw markup) like
> >> XXE and oXygen.
> >>
> >>
> >> However, Vex looks very interesting ...
> >>
> >> "Vex is an editor for XML documents. The "visual" part comes from the
> >> fact that Vex hides the raw XML tags from the user, providing instead a
> >> wordprocessor-like interface."
> >>
> >> "Vex is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL),
> >> meaning that it will always be free to use, modify, and re-distribute."
> >>
> >> "The Vex editor widget is available as a pure Java, cross-platform
> >> component with bindings to Swing and SWT. Developers can re-use this
> >> widget, for example as an applet in a web-based application."
> >>
> >> http://vex.sourceforge.net/
> >
> > Nice find, that is *exactly* what I am looking for - essentially an
> > open source Word with structured documents. That could become very
> > popular, I'll check it out.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
>
> you might want to check it's size........
> 25MB is hardly small, for a java package, even if most of it is made up from
> eclipse.
>
> Steve

Right, there also have not been a release for a year so it might be
stagnating.

What the hell I will write my own...