How to highlighting differences between 2 html files - html

My web application has job descriptions. These job descriptions can be modified by some users. Each modification result in a new version of the job description.
The content of the job description is edited by the users, in html, directly in the textearea using the tinymce editor.
I want to be able to show a user the modifications made to the content from one version to another.
The simpler the better, for example, just a green background for added content and a blue background for removed content.
The application is a ruby on rails app and I have full access to my server (slicehost)

You might also look at differ.

This might be helpful http://markmcb.com/2008/11/04/ruby-on-rails-diff-text-to-html-ins-and-del/
This uses the diff utility available on most systems and formatting changes would be highlighted as well.

You should use a simple diff program. Here are some good ones:
OSX
FileMerge - Apples own. Installed with XCode
Changes - Good little app
Araxis Merge - Commercial but featureful
*Nix
Meld - Full featured
Kompare - KDE, very nice
Gdkdiff - Simple but effective
tkdiff - Unkown
simply use the diff command line command...
Win
Winmerge - One of the best

Related

how to configure Apache + SVN webDAV directory listing

I have an subversion server running with Apache mod_dav_svn and it works nicely but the browsing ability via HTML is a bit spartan. Is there a way to customize it at all?
There's two things I'd like to do to make a huge difference:
separate the directories from the files so all the directories are at the top. Right now everything is in alphabetical order. (the picture above happens to have all the directories preceding files in alphabetical order, but trust me, that's not the normal case)
List the basic file statistics (file size, mod time, last updated version, etc)
Is it posssible to do either of these with mod_dav_svn?
In a vanilla Subversion install, the web interface is very spartan by design. (Remember the HTTP interface is designed for SVN clients, not human beings.)
You can customize the display somewhat via the SVNIndexXSLT directive. (Here is a good place to start).
If you want something richer (with logs and diff features), you will need to install a special front end. WebSVN and ViewVC are very popular. There is also Trac, but this is a higher-level tool.
A list of other repo browsing tools.
Just FYI, we use WebSVN for our repo instance. It took some effort to get it up and running, but once it is setup you can pretty much leave it alone.
WebSvn looks like it might help you. I tried trac and it is very slick but I found it to be complicated and seems overkill for what you're looking for, imo.
Not out of the box - that is, without modifying the source code. You might be interested in tools like ViewSVN or the more sophisticated trac or redmine.

Which Mercurial plugin should I use for IntelliJ

Which of the hg plug-ins has:
the least hassles
causes the least trouble
is prettiest
Can't claim to have tried a wide variety, but, what's wrong with hg4idea...?
In regards to the "don't use one" response - this is hardly adequate. What if I use my IDE to do a refactoring that renames a file? Without IDE/source control integration, the file rename is made without regards to source control, and then Mercurial (or whatever else) thinks a file went missing and a new one appeared. Then you have to go back to wrangle with the source control to sort things out.
JetBrains seems to have chosen hg4idea-luciad for its upcoming Python editor (PyCharm) and it is now more active than hg4idea
It looks like a leader is on the way :-)
To answer your question: The best IDE PlugIn is don't use on.
I think IDE integration is not necessary when working with a DVCS. When working in a centralized System, it is reasonable for the purpose of automatic check out on edit. However, I like keeping things separate. I don't want my IDE cluttered up. I don't see any benefits in using a plug-in compared to a standalone solution (that I keep running on a second monitor etc. ).
I am fine with TortoiseHG and the command line for more complicated tasks.

How to display credits

I want to give credit to all open source libraries we use in our (commercial) application. I thought of showing a HTML page in our about dialog. Our build process uses ant and the third party libs are committed in svn.
What do you think is the best way of generating the HTML-Page?
Hard code the HTML-Page?
Switch dependency-management to apache-ivy and write some ant task to generate the html
Use maven-ant-tasks and write some ant task to generate the HTML
Use maven only to handle the dependencies and the HTML once, download them and commit them. The rest is done by the unchanged ant-scripts
Switch to maven2 (Hey boss, I want to switch to maven, in 1 month the build maybe work again...)
...
What elements should the about-dialog show?
Library name
Version
License
Author
Homepage
Changes made with link to source archive
...
Is there some best-practise-advice? Some good examples (applications having a nice about-dialog showing the dependencies)?
There are two different things you need to consider.
First, you may need to identify the licenses of the third-party code. This is often down with a THIRDPARTYLICENSE file. Sun Microsystems does this a lot. Look in the install directory for OpenOffice.org, for example. There are examples of .txt and .html versions of such files around.
Secondly, you may want to identify your dependencies in the About box in a brief way (and also refer to the file of license information). I would make sure the versions appear in the About box. One thing people want to quickly check for is an indication of whether the copy of your code they have needs to be replaced or updated because one of your library dependencies has a recently-disclosed bug or security vulnerability.
So I guess the other thing you want to include in the about box is a way for people to find your support site and any notices of importance to users of the particular version (whether or not you have a provision in your app for checking on-line for updates).
Ant task seems to be the best way. We do a similar thing in one of our projects. All the open source libraries are present in a specified folder. An Ant task reads the manifest of these libraries, versions and so on and generates an HTML, copies into another specified folder from where it is picked up by the web container.
Generating the page with each build would be wasteful if the libraries are not going to change often. Library versions may change, but the actual libraries don't. Easier to just create a HTML page would be the easiest way out, but that's one more maintenance head ache. Generate it once and include it with the package. The script can always be run again in case some changes are being made to the libraries (updating versions, adding new libraries).

How to automate the tasks for releasing open-source-software?

Everyone managing open-source-software runs into the problem, that with the time the process of releasing a new version gets more and more work. You have to tag the release in your version-control, create the distributions (that should be easy with automated builds), upload them to your website and/or open-source-hoster. You have to announce the new release with nearly the same message on chosen web-forums, the news-system on sourceforge, mailinglists and your blog or website. And you have to update the entry of your software on freshmeat. Possible more tasks have to be done for the release.
Do you developed techniques to automate some of these tasks? Does software exist that supports you with this?
Pragmatic Project Automation shows how to do all of that. They use Ant for practically everything in the book, so if you know Ant you can make different targets to do any step in the build-release cycle.
For my Perl stuff, I wrote Module::Release. In the top-level directory I type a single command:
% release
If checks several things and dies if anything is wrong. If everything checks out, it uploads the distribution.
It automates my entire process:
Test against multiple versions of Perl
Test distribution files
Check the status of source control
Check for code and distribution quality metrics
Update changes file
Determine new version number
Release code to multiple places
Tag source control with new version number
Everyone seems to write their own release automator though. Most people like their process how they like their process, so general solutions don't work out that well socially.
Brad Fitzpatrick has ShipIt which is a Perl program to automate releases. There's slightly more info in his original announcement.

What have you done to customize your IDE? [closed]

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What tweaks / addins / themes do you have rigged up to make your IDE awesome? For example, in Visual Studio I color themes, CodeRush draws lines between braces, I always install and use the Consolas font and I have it setup to sync my settings across computers for when I change hotkeys and whatnot with the help of FolderShare.
Also, this isn't Visual Studio specific, please feel free to mention what you do with Emacs or Eclipse or whatnot as many of us use a few.
ReSharper 4.1 for Visual Studio 2008. It's a beautiful thing. It looks for all kinds of code errors, optimizations, etc. My code is cleaner thanks to this handy Visual Studio plugin.
Optimizing the IDE will be the first step. Resharper helps a lot but sometimes some simple macros are more than enough.
First things first. Change the font from the default crappy one. Then start fiddling with the 'Options' dialog box.
At the recommendation of a friend, I installed Visual Assist for Visual Studio 2008 -- it is awesome. I swear it can read my mind.
[Note: I have no affiliation with them -- just a very happy customer]
I've done a lot, but I really shouldn't have. So in the last few years, I've toned down the number of macros, custom key mappings, custom toolbars, etc. For the most part, I'm of the opinion that developers should get used to the default behavior and appearance of their IDE. Then when you need to work on your colleague's machine, you still know how to get around and manage to help them out. Not to mention that a whole slew of customizations will get broken or rearranged or otherwise reset when an update comes out.
That said, there are a few things that I still do every time I set up an IDE to work on... for example, setting the number of concurrent builds in Visual Studio to be 1, because that feature is so broken that nothing will compile correctly with any greater setting. Apart from that, being an ace with the default behavior will ultimately make you more efficient than spending hours tweaking the software to make it just a little more fluid.
I like CodeSmart VB6 and CodeSmart VS.NET from Axtools http://www.axtools.com/
for advanced syntax highlighting, drawing lines between parts of If..then..else..endif, Do While ... loop and all other constructs. It also has great code auditors and many add-in functions.
Vi plugin!!
I use Emacs. My .emacs file is only a few hundred lines long, but does customize settings based on my machine's hostname and operating system, so that I can use the same config file pretty much anywhere.
Colorization - Custom - White Text on GreyishBlack, Consolas Font
HotKeys - CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+Z (Attach to Process) probably some others too...
Addins - DPack, Coderush, GhostDoc.
Toolbars Off
All Windows set to collapsed
I am not doing presentations with this machine - If I was it would be barebones.
eclipse plugins make my ide exactly the way I want it of course.
eclipse plugin central
I kinda like the default setup of VS, I only make sure about Consolas as the editor font, and tabsize 2 (tabs to spaces), and change the color of numbers (red).
For Java development using Eclipse I have a few plugins that are indispensable. The MyEclipse Workbench adds a lot of functionality to most of the built-in modules. It makes it very easy to deploy an application to multiple application servers, and enhances a lot of the built-in editors. The PMD plugin is great for searching for potential code issues. As mentioned in a previous post today, the Ganymede plugin really helps to highlight log entries.
I dont care much for fancy visual addons, so I left my IDE (Visiual Studio) in the standard look (other than MS Reference Sans Serif font).
I usually change the color scheme to have a black background instead of white.
I use the Zenburn color scheme with Proggy Clean for a font. It's like a comfy chair for my eyes.
Nothing. I hate dealing with all the breakages that inevitably result from updates, etc. So, I adapt myself to my IDE instead.
I've using a combination of ViEmu and ReSharper with a dark theme.
Oh, and I also hide most of the toolbars and turn off the animations to try to speed things up.
Silver background, 8pt Consolas, disable all toolbars and set tab spacing to 3 spaces. :)
For Visual Studio
Most important - Resharper - I bought my own copy so I don't have to badger my employer about it.
Change the colourisation/font - choose whatever suits you
Optimisation (vote up Gulzar's post with the link in it)
Don't try and make the IDE do everything, just because you can. (Kind of ironic seeing I use emacs as well). I personally really dislike integrated source code management.
Change some defaut file associations so double clicking certain file types doesn't kick off Visual Studio
Aside from Resharper I've actually found most other beneficial thing is not customising the IDE, but customising yourself to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Start with the big gains like Ctrl -, Ctrl Shift -, Ctrl Shift V, Ctrl Alt L etc. etc. and then gradually learn the rest of the shortcuts in order of how often you'd use them
Rather than customizing the IDE, I customized my error messages. I have a macro that expands to a #pragma warning statement that generates a compile-time message in the same format as MSVC++. Visual Studio can parse the resulting warning, so a double-click on the message opens the offending file in the IDE and takes me right to the line in question.
I've used the macro:
To "bookmark" a section of code, so developers will be nagged to fix it each time they build.
Within #if blocks to test for various compile-time conditions.
In headers, to see who #includes them, and where.
From vim you can set the makeprg (make program) variable to a command that will build your project, and the errorformat variable to a scanf-style string that describes the format of the build errors. From there:
:make will build your project
:cl lists all of the errors that match errorformat
:cc takes to you the current error
:cn takes you to the next error
:cp takes you to the previous error.
Out of the box, vim sets makeprg and errorformat to work with make and gcc, and all of the commands are documented within vim's built-in help.
I do Java development in Eclipse. Here are some of the plug ins I find useful:
Mylyn - hides project elements not relevant to the current context.
eUML2 - UML editor.
FindBugs - Static analysis tool to find common bugs in Java.
Crap4J - Another static analysis tool.
EclEmma - Code coverage plug-in for unit tests.
Edit: I forgot one:
Disable the spellchecker. :)
In visual studio 2005 I do these:
Bind F11 to fullscreen mode
Enable a vertical line at 80 characters: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor\Guides = "RGB(196,196,196) 80" (Guides won't be present in the registry.)
Add the "Start Debugging", "Break All" and "Stop Debugging" buttons after the "Help" menu.
I am using Vim Cscope plugin.
Cscope is like 'ctags' on steroids and makes traversing code much easier.
I usually use it along with tags to find where a function is declared and then go directly to whatever code is calling this function.
I also use Vim's Rgrep plugin (recursive search) to search for files in the code hierarchy.
Create some basic macro such as printing bug fix code comments:
Public Sub WriteBugFix()
Dim TS As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection
TS.Text = "'Edited for Bug Fixed By JK - " & Date.Now.ToShortDateString
End Sub
(This answer assumes the workstation is a GNU/Linux computer.)
Emacs makes an excellent IDE specifically because it can be greatly customized.
You customize Emacs by editing the .emacs file in your home directory. My .emacs is a symbolic link:
$ ln -s /home/bzimmerly/bin/emacs/emacs24/wbz.emacs.el .emacs
Since Emacs offers a variety of specialized major modes for program development and debugging, you can easily "roll your own" IDE design that works best for you. For example, when I'm programming in C or assembler, I like to have the left side running GDB mode, with the right side displaying the source being traced.
A little bit of LISP skill goes a long way to turning Emacs into a very powerful IDE. It is well worth the investment of time to learn how to use this powerful tool!
Finally, tools like Youtube are valuable places for learning how to do this. Just entering "Emacs as an IDE" on the Youtube search form will show videos of how people have modified Emacs for just such a purpose. There are videos on editing Python code, Javascript, Java, C, etc.