👷🏽‍♀️ Help build the designer with your contributions! 🧰

[worksofliam]

Hi folks! To get this editor through the finish line, I am looking for other people who are interested in contributing. I did get a majority of the ground work done.

We are not currently looking for people to test the designer. Offering to test is not helpful at this time.

Project board

Check out our project board! It contains two things:

1. The project architecture in the Project details tab (openable on the right of the board)
2. The current set of tasks, grouped into two main areas, as well as one additional one.

Task areas

There are two main task areas which we need help with, but there is a general requirement that anyone who works on this code base be proficient with TypeScript and Node.js.

• Frontend / JS+TS: someone that wants to work on frontend tasks specifically, though this may bleed into backend code since the two are tightly connected. Some frontend tasks depend on backend code being written to work. This will be a mix of TypeScript and JavaScript.
• TypeScript / DDS: someone that wants to work on backend tasks specifically. This usually involves creating code to generate new lines of DDS to reflect the changes made in the frontend. We also need folks to write a lot of test cases for our DisplayFile class, which is powering a lot of the parsing and generating logic for the editor. It would really help if this person had experience, or an understand of DDS and display files.

How to contribute

Finding folks who have Node.js knowledge and DDS knowledge is quite an interesting mix, and I will be most fortunate to find new people to help contribute to this open-source project. A display file editor is one of the most demanded features that the Code for IBM i family of extensions does not have.

• You're welcome to ask any questions on this post. I will be happy to answer them!
• Please reach out to me on chat.ibmioss.org, where I can help you gain access to the repo where you can make branches and pull requests directly!

[richardschoen]

The problem will be finding the special mix of people with NodeJS, DDS and available time.

From the discussion we had a week or so back I thought you said IBM was taking this up internally ? Maybe I misunderstood what we talked about.

Or does that mean Liam recruits outsiders to help with building it via open source :-)

Seems to me that if IBM wants to provide this support in short order they need to apply more than Liam muscle.

[worksofliam]

Supporting the extensions (easier) and building something new (difficult) are two different worlds entirely.

There is a large team of folks ready to support the extensions. Similar to my situation, the developers are working on multiple things, and me adding more work to their plate isn't always easy.

Everything under the codefori organization is also always open to contributors. These projects started as community-led projects and always will be.

[richardschoen]

Large team ready to support and needing volunteers seems to be at odds.

Anyway my discussions about SDA are done for now.

When people don’t upgrade to V7R6 SDA will be back and by that time the SDA plugin may be a reality as well possibly.

We do appreciate all your efforts !!

Just not the efforts of the people trash canning still useful functionality like SDA.

[worksofliam]

Large team ready to support and needing volunteers seems to be at odds.

IBM development is scheduled, which kind of conflicts with how I schedule my development 😄 So either we wait and it will get done at the scheduled time, or we round up folks (exactly like Code for IBM i, etc) and we work on faster. Nothing really out of the ordinary here.

Sadly I don't have much to say about SDA. But, I do know we can build something!

[johnstagliano]

I wish I knew nodeJS to be able to help, but, I do not.

And, I appreciate all the hard work you have put into VS Code / Code4i.

As we are migrating to Win11 we are not reinstalling RDI. Therefore, we are left with SDA and unable to upgrade to V7R6.

Therefore, I do have 2 questions...

1. Is there an ETA for the completion of the VS Code Screen Designer.
2. Is there any plan to develop a print file designer.

Thank you!