Yahoo! Widget Development Toolkit

An Eclipse plugin for widget authors

YWDT Preview now available!

YWDT version 0.1.0 is now available for installation through Eclipse's Software Updates tool. The update site is: http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~fwwarr/ywdt/
See detailed installation instructions. and the quick start guide.
All feedback is much appreciated, use either the Konfabutator forums topic, or the SourceForge project tools, to your convenience.

Overview

YWDT aims to be an all-in-one open source solution for widget development. The many tools provided are all integrated into the very customizable Eclipse workbench so that you don't have to switch programs for different parts of your widget (like javascript and XML), yet still get all the best features including syntaxt highlighting, code completion and much much more. A Visual Widget Editor is also planned, but for now graphics must be created separately. I would recommend The GIMP as an open source graphics solution.

Features

New Widget Wizard:

• This is a great way to get started developing widgets. The wizard asks you for your widget's basic information and automatically creates a widget shell that is ready to run!
• Automatically creates the whole widget folder structure.
• Creates all the necessary files and initializes them according to your input.
• Option to keep java code in a separate file.
• Creates the localization folders and files according to the specified locales.
• Helps ensure good practices such as defining a unique widget identifier.

Automatic Widget Packaging:

• YWDT provides an automatic "builder" that can package your widget in the background each time its code is saved. Optionally, the "builder" can be run manually, or the Converter widget can easily be used.
• Supports flat or zipped formats
• Supports certificates (untested)

Eclipse's Editors provide:

• Syntax highlighting for XML and JavaScript
• Code Outline
• DTD specific code completion
• A nice XML editor that removes the burden of explicitly dealing with tags
• A JSLint plugin is also available

Other nice features:

• One button access to the Konfabulator Reference Manual, to be viewed directly within Eclipse, or in a separate web browser.
• Help documentation including links to Javascript and XML resources.
• A no-nonesense perspective for widget development

More to come:

• Code templates and more automatic code generation
• Identifier uniqueness validator
• Visual widget creator? (based on Eclipse Visual Editor Project)
• True widget debugging with breakpoints? (with Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework)