Creating LiveCode applications that play well with git

[openworld]

Trevor,

Have been working in recent days on a parallel project –- look forward to retrying the Levure install based on your suggestions. I'd love to see LiveCode projects integrate by default with Github in the future!

Could Levure include a workflow dashboard at some stage that offers a top view of activity on short-term and long-term branches?

Here's an example –

http://learngitbranching.js.org/?demo (screenshot attached)

In recent Forum threads on D3.js, Digital Pomegranate has shared a stack on how LiveCode calls to D3 can dynamically create visuals on cards.

Perhaps this would be a way for a Levure dashboard to give contributors in a LiveCode Github project to see the status of branches?

For LiveCoders who are new to Github, it also would be wonderful if links to resources like the one below were in the Levure stack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNIIx9PMSEc

Look forward to any feedback, and to making the jump to Levure soon!

Best,

Mark

[Mikey]

Why wouldn't you use a tool that already does this, like GitKraken or Atlassin?

[openworld]

Mikey,

Can these tools also be called by LiveCode scripts, and send back an interactive diagram?

In a D3 thread on the Facebook LiveCode User group, Todd mentioned plans to share a sample stack by Digital Pomegranate with this capability. Gurgen, can you post a link in this thread once it is ready?

Best,

Mark

[Mikey]

Hmmmm, I don't know, but what is the advantage of doing that? Maybe I misunderstand what you're hoping to do.

[openworld]

Mikey,

I'd love to see a single stack from which one could manage the interactions with Github. It could be a Levure 2.0 stack. Or it could be part of the "Workbench" tool I mentioned in another thread that an open source project manager could fill in with goodies useful to a distributed team of contributors.

In either case, a D3 (or other) visualization showing the current status of commits on the master branch and short-life branches could be a useful for all to see the project status.

In the future, I hope something like Gource could be part of the dashboard card too, displaying who was working on what –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckiE_sgX-eU

Best,

Mark

[trevordevore]

@openword - While the tools you are looking for are very useful I don't think they are a good fit for integrating into Levure. Levure is an application framework. The framework itself won't have any tools for visualizing the work you are doing. You could certainly build a plugin for the IDE that displays any data you find useful in your project management.

[Mikey]

While we're back on this topic, this is really cool. I think I've found my new way of building stuff in LC. I was very skeptical, but I think I prefer this to the traditional way of building apps in LC.

[dave.kilroy]

@Mikey I agree - I haven't had a chance to play with Levure yet on my dev machine and have only watched the video(s) and poked around the github repo - but it looks exactly like a 'great leap forward'

Thank you and well done Trevor!!!!!

Dave

[Mikey]

Don't forget Brian - he has been writing lots of documentation and answering lots of questions, which has made the transition a lot easier to understand.

[dave.kilroy]

Very good point @mikey - thanks also to Brian and sorry I didn't include you first time!

[jim1001]

I'm trying to take advantage of the hard work done by Trevor & the rest in setting this up. My LiveCode projects to date have been a bit disorganised and wasteful without libraries and version control.

I've been working through Get Started on the Levure wiki & have got to the Install LiveCode Linter bit. For this it says you have to install LiveCode server. To date I haven't needed the server version. I guess that you only need the server running so the code can be checked in real time but you can carry on developing with the LiveCode IDE as before whilst this is happening - is that correct? Will the rest of Levure (apart from Linter) work without installing LiveCode server?

Thanks again to all for getting this up & running.

[trevordevore]

Welcome to the party @jim1001.

If you are going to code in the LiveCode IDE then you don't need to worry about anything related to Sublime Text or the linter.

If you do want to use Sublime Text then LiveCode server is needed for reporting errors in your code while you code in Sublime Text. The linter will send the script you are typing in Sublime Text to the LiveCode server executable and try to parse it, reporting any errors that are reported.

[jim1001]

Thanks for the welcome & quick reply Trevor.

To be clear then, if you're creating a LiveCode app using the IDE you could still use Sublime Text to edit code (& linter to check as you type)?

From what I've seen of your screencasts, Sublime Text seems to offer more features and help to the coder than using the editor in the IDE - would you agree? Or do you think the advantages aren't that great if you don't need the server for anything else?

[trevordevore]

Yes, you can use Sublime Text and the IDE at the same time. I see a significant increase in productivity when I edit the UI in the IDE and use SublimeText for editing all scripts. It took me a week or two to get used to Sublime Text but I feel very sluggish when working in the IDE editor now.

[jim1001]

Understood - thanks Trevor.

I'm now on the Set Up Your Project Folder part of Getting Started but got an error - see attached. The levure folder didn't get created but app & builds did. I tried running LiveCode as Administrator but got same.

Another thing I’m unsure of - on the Getting Started page it says you need the Levure framework & gave the GitHub Levure page. So I downloaded and unzipped this which gave me a levure-master folder. Did I need to do this? If so, does it matter where it goes?

Sorry for all the questions. Your help is appreciated.

Some other info which may or may not be relevant:
I’m running Windows 7 64 bit
I’m using Portable Git

ps: let me know if you'd like me to start a new thread