[orion-dev] Orion and a domain-specific IDE

[Axel Hecht <axel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

quick intro, as I'm new: I'm Axel Hecht from Mozilla, Pike on mozilla's 
irc server, mozPike on freenode (rarely). I'm working on l10n 
infrastructure, and as most of our tools, hacking on those in python.

On to my real question:

I'm interested in a domain-specific IDE, in particular, an "integrated 
localization environment", with things like "discover new strings" to 
syntax checks to "get me a test build".

Now, for some things orion is an obvious fit, but I wonder what your 
thoughts are on integrating the orion editor into a different work 
environment. Some data points: we probably want a mercurial back end, 
translation suggestions for code completion, project overview should 
compare to English, so there'd be richer metadata to both the project as 
well as some form of navigator.

We have existing code for the back end in python, and we've got about 
zero java hackers, just to spice the question up a bit :-).

Naively, it looks like we could take a stab at figuring out java and how 
to extend/bend-its-arms the IDE parts, or try to replicate the server 
API for the orion editor client to talk to in python. Not so naively, 
I'm scared of both.

Thanks

Axel