Reflective Web Application (WebIDE)

Question

Preamble

So, this question has already been answered, but as it was my first question for this project, I'm going to continue to reference it in other questions I ask for this project.

For anyone who came from another question, here is the basic idea: Create a web app that can make it much easier to create other web applications or websites. To do this, you would basically create a modular site with "widgets" and then combine them into the final display pages. Each widget would likely have its own set of functions combined in a Class if you use Prototype or .prototype.fn otherwise.

Currently

I am working on getting the basics down: editing CSS, creating user JavaScript functions and dynamically finding their names/inputs, and other critical technical aspects of the project. Soon I will create a rough timeline of the features I wish to create. Soon after I do this, I intent to create a Blog of sorts to keep everyone informed of the project's status.

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Original Question

Hello all, I am currently trying to formalize an idea I have for a personal project (which may turn into a professional one later on). The concept is a reflective web application. In other words, a web application that can build other web applications and is actively used to build and improve itself. Think of it as sort of a webapp IDE for creating webapps.

So before I start explaining it further, my question to all of you is this: What do you think would be some of the hardest challenges along the way and where would be the best place to start?

Now let me try to explain some of the aspects of this concept briefly here. I want this application to be as close to a WYSIWYG as possible, in that you have a display area which shows all or part of the website as it would appear. You should be free to browse it to get to the areas you want to work on and use a JavaScript debugger/console to ask "what would happen if...?" questions.

I intend for the webapps to be built up via components. In other words, the result would be a very modular webapp so that you can tweak things on a small or large scale with a fair amount of ease (generally it should be better than hand coding everything in <insert editor of choice>).

Once the website/webapp is done, this webapp should be able to produce all the code necessary to install and run the created website/webapp (so CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and PHP installer for the database).

Here are the few major challenges I've come up with so far:

• Changing CSS on the fly
• Implementing reflection in JavaScript
• Accurate and brief DOM tree viewer
• Allowing users to choose JavaScript libraries (i.e. Prototype, jQuery, Dojo, extJS, etc.)

Any other comments and suggestions are also welcome.

Edit 1: I really like the idea of AppJet and I will check it out in detail when I get the time this weekend. However, my only concern is that this is supposed to create code that can go onto others webservers, so while AppJet might be a great way for me to develop this app more rapidly, I still think I will have to generate PHP code for my users to put on their servers.

Also, when I feel this is ready for beta testers, I will certainly release it for free for everyone on this site. But I was thinking that out of beta I should follow a scheme similar to that of git: Free for open source apps, costs money for private/proprietary apps.

Answer 1

Why use PHP?

Appjet does something really similar using 100% Javascript on the client and server side with rhino.

This makes it easier for programmers to use your service, and easier for you to deploy. In fact even their data storage technique uses Javascript (simple native objects), which is a really powerful idea.

Answer 2

Conceptually, you would be building widgets, a widget factory, and a factory making factory.

So, you would have to find all the different types of interactions that could be possible in making a widget, between widgets, within a factory, and between multiple widget making factories to get an idea.

Something to keep on top of how far would be too far to abstract?

**I think you would need to be able to abstract a few layers completely for the application space itself. Then you'd have to build some management tool for it all. **

- Presentation, Workflow and the Data tier.

Presentation: You are either receiving feedback, or putting in input. Usually as a result of clicking, or entering something. A simple example is making dynamic web forms in a database. What would you have to store in a database about where it comes/goes from? This would probably make up the presentation layer. This would probably be the best exercise to start with to get a feel for what you may need to go with.

Workflow: it would be wise to build a simple workflow engine. I built on*e modeled on Windows Workflow* that I had up and running in 2 days. It could set the initial event that should be run, etc. From a designer perspective, I would imagine a visio type program to link these events. The events in the workflow would then drive the presentation tier.

Data: You would have to store the data about the application as much as the data in the application. So, form, event, data structures could possibly be done by storing xml docs depending on whether you need to work with any of the data in the forms or not. The data of the application could also be stored in empty xml templates that you fill in, or in actual tables. At that point you'd have to create a table creation routine that would maintain a table for an app to the spec. Google has something like this with their google DB online.

Hope that helps. Share what you end up coming up with.