TSW Blog

Two new features for this post, both IntelliSense related. First of all, HTML 5 has been included in WebCoder 2010, allowing you to specify it as the desired standard for your documents. This will be reflected in the IntelliSense, where you get access to the new tags and attributes, as well as in the Code Inspector, and your markup will be validated against the HTML 5 specification.

Another cool HTML IntelliSense feature in WebCoder 2010 is the path IntelliSense. It will help you fill out most of the attributes which specifies a file URL, for instance the href attribute of the <a> tag or the src attribute of the <img> tag. Here is a couple of screenshots where you can see it in action:

I hope you like what you see, and as always, I will appreciate your feedback! :)

A lot of people have been requesting more options in the convert menu, so with WebCoder 2010, this menu has gone from a few items to currently 11 items, as you can see on the screenshot.

The lowercase and uppercase functions are probably well known from WebCoder 2009, but the Capitalize function is new. It simply capitalizes each word in the selected text.

The new comment functions are all context-sensitive, so they will use the proper comment notification depending on which language your cursor is currently placed in.

The list functions existed as scripts in previous versions of WebCoder, but to make them easier to find and use, I have included them in the menu.

The next two options are inspired by a user request. The first one will take the selected lines and place each of them inside a PHP echo statement, while escaping quotes if necessary. The second one will do the exact opposite.

The last one is a bit special. It allows you to select a PHP string and then have it escaped properly. It will both add and remove escaping as necessary, to give you a valid string. It might need some fine-tuning, but I think it's a pretty useful little feature :)

So, what else do we need, guys? Let me know what you think!

SQL IntelliSense was actually on my TODO list for WebCoder 2009, but I couldn't quite figure out the right way to do it. The easy way would have been to provide IntelliSense for SQL keywords in the Database result window, but that wasn't enough. Here's a couple of screenshots of the most basic functionality, helping you write SQL for the Database part of WebCoder much faster and more efficient:

As you can see, you get IntelliSense for both keywords and MySQL functions. Parameter hinting is implemented as well:

That's all very nice for writing and testing your SQL, but with help from the help of Inline SQL highlighting, we can actually provide the same IntelliSense directly in your code:

It tries to detect when you write a string that is likely SQL and then highlights it as such. I think this is pretty cool, but the next screenshot is really what it's all about:

When you attach a database to your project, or simply have one open in the "Databases" panel, WebCoder will read all the tables and their columns and keep them in memory, allowing you to access them through IntelliSense. It will use your aliases and propose table names, aliases and even columns for tables. I have using this feature for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it - I hope you will too! Let me know what you think :)

An area that has been much improved in WebCoder 2010, is the SQL support. In this post, I will show you the first step, which is syntax highlighting of SQL code inside your PHP files. Since SQL in PHP is really just text strings, this is a bit tricky to get right all the time, but I think that it's better to have it working 95% of the time than to miss out on a really cool feature. So without further ado, here it is:

In this color theme, the SQL colors are pretty similar to the PHP colors, but as you can see, the actual SQL keywords and function names are highlighted. Since WebCoder can now identify SQL in your code, it offers some cool possibilities, most of which we will look into in the next blog post, but here is one of them:

This function will execute the SQL statement against your currently active database connection. If you have inline PHP variables, WebCoder will try to detect them and then prompt you for their value, allowing you to test your SQL queries in various situations. In the next post, I will show you something even more awesome from the SQL world of WebCoder 2010. Stay tuned and let me know what you think :)

One of the things that I find my self trying to improve all the time, is the IntelliSense in WebCoder. As you will see in future posts, WebCoder 2010 will come with a bunch of very cool IntelliSense additions, and the PHP IntelliSense is of course one of them. Here's a couple of examples on what I've done:

Support for nested objects, where you can access members of members of an object. The screenshot should tell it all :)

PHP's own classes have been added to the IntelliSense along with all the usual stuff like functions and reserved words, and of course, you can even see members of the built-in PHP classes, like on the screenshot where we use the DOMDocument class.

Now imagine a situation like on this next screenshot: You get something that you know is an object of a specific class, but since PHP is so dynamic, there is really no way for WebCoder to know which class it is. That will leave you without IntelliSense, which is always a shame. However, in WebCoder 2010, I've added some cool intelligence, allowing WebCoder to try to guess which class you're using. It looks at the members you have already used on a variable, and if it can find one single class with these members, it offers you the IntelliSense we all know and love. Have a look at the next screenshot, where I've helped WebCoder by using a member only found on ClassOne, allowing WebCoder to guess the class:

Pretty cool, right? These are all somewhat small features, but I feel that they make a big difference, and coding with them through the last couple of months has been great! I hope you like it all, and stay tuned for the next time, where I bring you yet another cool feature of WebCoder 2010. In the meantime, let me know what you think of the features presented in this post :)

In phpCoder 2008, the dropdown list in the top, listing classes, functions and variables, was introduced. In WebCoder 2009, the tag chain was introduced. In WebCoder 2010, the two functions have been combined and made context sensitive, so that they always show you relevant information, depending on which type of code you're editing. It works for PHP:

For JavaScript:

For HTML, where you get the tag chain:

And even for CSS, where selectors are divided up into elements, classes and ID's:

It only takes up ~24 pixels of your screen height, but can help you overlook and navigate your documents much faster, and if you don't agree, it can obviously be turned off.

Hope you like it :)

The first new feature that I want to show you, is one that has been requested quite a bit in the last couple of versions. In WebCoder 2010, you will be able to create color themes, for syntax coloring, but also for other colors used in the editing area. They will be included in the same configuration file, giving you total customization of the editor and the ability to change between different color themes with a couple of clicks. The settings dialog has been modified to reflect this - the syntax coloring tab is now called "Editor colors", and has been divided into two areas: One for language specific colors and one for editor specific colors, e.g. background color, color for line highlighting, indentation guides, line numbers and so on. It's all working pretty well by now, and I hope that you will like it enough to create your own cool themes and hopefully even share them as well. In the spirit of that, I've made it easier to get a good overview of the various settings for each language, by changing the interface where you set colors and styles for the language. At the same time, I replaced the very simple preview control with a real editor, so that you can see exactly how your theme looks like. I think it turned out pretty well:

I know that a lot of you prefer editing code on a dark background, so I have included a Dark theme in the package. Here's WebCoder with a whole other set of colors than you might be used to:

The colors are just a suggestion, and hopefully you guys will improve it and share it with the rest of the users!

Please let me know what you think! See you in part 3 :)

When I started the work on xCoder 2010 back in August 2009, I had no idea what the name would be. I didn't exactly call my project "xCoder" internally, but I did have another codename for it. I wasn't really sure what direction I should go, but I already had some ideas that I knew I wanted to do no matter what, so I started with those. The big question, put in my mind by several customers, was whether to combine phpCoder and WebCoder or keep them as separate products, and if they should be combined, which name should be used? With the feedback from the xCoder 2010 forum, as well as feedback obtained from a range of trusted customers, I slowly made the decision: I wanted one application with the best from both worlds, mainly because people seemed to be bothered by the fact that they had to choose between two applications. My initial idea was to use a brand new name for this merged application, but I'm simply to fond of the WebCoder name to let it go. In other words, xCoder 2010 will be TSW WebCoder 2010, with the very best from phpCoder 2008 and WebCoder 2009 and a range of new stuff as well! I think this is what people want, and the more I think of it, it's what I want as a webdeveloper too.

This has all been very theoretic, but I promise that in my next post, I will start to show you some of the new goodies from WebCoder 2010. Stay tuned :)

The xCoder process has already been long. I asked for your input a couple of months ago, but I had actually done quite a bit of work before that as well. Instead of doing long stretches of work on the application and then releasing it as beta, I have done it differently this time. I have spent shorter periods of time developing the application, and in between those, I have used it extensively for various web projects and written down all the bugs I found and the ideas I came up with. This led to a pretty big TODO list of both small and bigger items, and each time I implemented a bunch of the changes, I came up with even more stuff that I wanted to do. This has been going on since August 2009 where I first stated the xCoder project, and since the new version is built on top of WebCoder 2009 code, the entire time has been used to add new features and perhaps more importantly: improve the old ones. Today, my TODO list has surpassed 200 changes, and most of them has already been implemented! Hopefully this will bring you the best web editor ever, and I'm already very excited to show it to you.

In the following weeks, I will tell you much more about this new application, which brings lots of positive changes to the world. In the meantime, while we wait for the beta, I urge you to participate in the xCoder 2010 forum. Let me know what you would like to see improved or added, so we can get it in there before the first beta version. As you can see, lots of users have already provided their feedback, and several requests have already been fulfilled. Thank you and stay tuned! :)

Dear all,

It's that time of year again, and therefore, I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas! The year of 2009 has almost passed now, and while I know that the last part of the year has been a bit quiet around here, I promise that next year will bring you all a new and exciting piece of software. As mentioned in a previous blog post, the name is xCoder, and you can help make it the best possible application, by participating in the xCoder feedback forum. I'm eager to show you what we have accomplished so far, but you will have to wait just a little bit longer. It will be great though!

Stay tuned, and have a very merry Christmas and an excellent New Year!