phideltacity

In my, seemingly interminable, search for a way to edit source-code on the iPad and at the same time enable me to save the changes directly back to a server I have come up with an idea. What if we used the power of Ajax to interact with the server to retrieve and store files? What if the offline capabilities built into modern browsers such as Safari (on the iPad?) were utilized for caching of files and edits? What if the power of formatting and dynamic HTML were used for syntax highlighting? What if in a phrase we were to utilize the browser as a code editor?

Now I by no means claim to be the first person ever to come up with this. After all there are a myriad of web-based HTML editors out there. And some software even has the ability to edit code inside a browser (such asCouchDB). but to generalize this to interact directly with an SVN repository may well be a novel idea. One would then have to simply put the editor code on the same server as the SVN repository in order to allow the Ajax components to have access to the repository URLs and presto you could edit files directly in the repository. This would solve the editing part of the equation and be sufficient for web-developers. To facilitate even more interaction server-side code could be added to facilitate even more actions (think compiles, restarts, and the like). This bundled with apps like iSSH (which could be used for even more server side processing) would create a pretty powerful web based IDE.

Of course this would require the user to be always on, but then that is why I bought the 3G iPad. But this still means a few more short comings,such as being unworkable on most airplanes and many railway trips, but it also solves a lot of problems.

I don’t quite know when (if) I will find the time to work on this, but I definitely think this would be a worthwhile open source project.

- Posted from my iPad

P.S.: why oh why does AirSharing HD not include an editor? That would be so damn close to solving my particular itch, I’d buy it all over again.