On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 06:14:30 GMT, Manu Evans wrote:
So, I'm trying to work with templates, and I'm finding it quite a tedious process.
It's awesome that they're compiled and super fast and all that, but it's really annoying during development.
I'm getting really tired of having to terminate the server, rebuild (because I changed some text in a template, or tweak or colour, or whatever), rebuild (not helped by the failed dependency checking in VD), launch, then switch back to my browser and refresh.
This seems a crazy iteration cycle to me. I'm assuming that I've missed something?Is there a way to interpret the templates at runtime during development? I should be able to edit a template, hit save, refresh my browser and see the changes.
Possible? Possible to implement if not?
Not possible as soon as any D code is embedded - unless someone writes a D interpreter that can sit on top of the static application state.
What are other peoples iteration cycles? Surely they can't work like this...?
It's not optimal, but I generally still find it acceptable since I personally don't have much tuning going on inside of templates (all optical aspects are handled by CSS, logic is handled in normal D code and not much is left in-between usually). The main improvement that I had planned in this area was to have a background process monitor source changes and automatically start a compilation pass in the background + seamlessly switch to a newly started process - but that wouldn't improve the turnaround time of course.
As far as I can see, there are three possibilities to get near-zero turnaround times:
- Use only static HTML
- Use some kind of embedded scripting language to generate HTML
- Compile each template to a separate DLL and dynamically load it into the process like you have already done for game entities
Option number three could probably even be nicely and seamlessly integrated into the current framework, but I definitely lack the time to do so.