So, I’ve been pondering over how exactly the editor is going to be implemented. I’ve decided not to use any of the existing web-based WYSIWYG editors, but rather use one of the AJAX toolkits out there to build the whole application. I’ve narrowed it down to 3 choices, and here they are, in order of my preference:

  1. Google Web Toolkit - Yep, it’s a Google product, so it should be quite fun to use! They have the good old swing-type widget concept here, so the main editor would consist of a custom widget that I will extend from the basic textarea. Yeah, if you notice, I will have to code in Java, which is not a problem for me at all. Before you arrive at any wrong conclusions, I would like to make it clear that GWT uses Java classes only as a base to generate code. The end-result is pure JavaScript + XHTML that can work with any server-side language (which in our case, is PHP). The advantages I see here are: support for a wide variety of browsers, a good solution for the triple-b (Browser Back Button) problem, and a robust framework to lean on.

  2. Yahoo UI Library -  Ok, so I mentioned Google, it would be unfair not to mention the competition. The Yahoo UI library is damn stable and widely used (it’s not in “beta” like most of Google’s products!). Rich widget library, although building a custom editor widget here would be much tougher. Great effects, cool CSS and design patterns to go along. Pretty much everything to get the editor up and running.

  3. Dojo - I don’t know why, but this reminds me of Django. Well Dojo uses the Moxie editor, which is to be modified to handle GuideXML instead of plain HTML. One thing that caught my eye here was the persistent storage functionality, that would allows users to temporarily save the document they are editing, on the server. I’m not sure we want that feature in the editor, but even otherwise, this toolkit is quite interesting.

Other than these 3, there is also Rico and Mochikit. This is the worst part about FLOSS, there’s just too much choice! Although my scales tip heavily towards the GWT (this being the Google Summer of Code and all!); I plead all of you to please send me your opinion of what toolkit would be the best fit for the project.