What lies ahead for Nvu « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

1Nov/0610

What lies ahead for Nvu

Nvu has been one of my favorite open source web editors since its 1.0 release in 2005.

For those who have never used Nvu. Nvu is a mature cross-platform web editor which features WYSIWYG editing of pages, integrated file management via FTP, reliable HTML generation, powerful support for forms, tables, and templates and so much more.

However its been more than a year since no new version has been released, so there had been speculation that the project had been canceled by Daniel Glazman, its main developer. Last Monday I caught up with him in an IRC session, and I want to share some stuff that he discussed.

Unfortunately, its official now! Nvu is dead! According to Daniel Glazman he discontinued the project because of inherent weaknesses in the engine it was based on, that is Mozilla Gecko 1.7. The engine was limiting the development team's ability to add new and innovative features like support for XULrunner. So a decision was made to dump the project and go for a from-scratch rewrite, currently the project is being called "Composer", not to be confused with Mozilla Composer . There are speculations about the name of the new Composer when asked if he was naming it after a furry animal, he replied "no comment", and when asked why he didn't just name it Nvu 2.0, that according to Daniel was not possible as Nvu was still a trademark with Linspire. Linspire by the way is not involved with Daniel in the new project. However trademark issues dont end with Nvu "Composer" too, is a Mozilla trademark however they have extended support to the new composer project, in the form of trademark relaxation and allocating space in their CVS repository. The only sponsor this time around is Disruptive Innovations itself, Daniel Glazman's own company, all in all there are currently four developers in the team.

So what features can we expect from the new Composer! When asked if he targeted feature compatibility to MS Frontpage and Dreamweaver, the de-facto website editors in Microsoft Windows, Glazman replied by saying "Frontpage is dead" and that he would love to be feature compatible with Dreamweaver. Website editors are an essential component in web development and open source website editors have always lagged their proprietary rivals, the new effort I hope will reduce the gap.

The new Composer will be standards compliant, when Daniel was asked if he would implement non-standard features if his views diverged W3C HTML working groups, his reply was that HTML 4 was the standard and that there will be no successors for any time soon. The new Composer will have everything one can expect from a decent website editor with lots of lots of innovations, initial releases will target XHTML/HTML 4 compatibility. Stylesheet management like in Dreamweaver, will be included in the new Composer.

When asked if he targeted professional developers or beginners, he replied that he was targeting both, creating a GUI for beginners and have all sorts of advanced functionality and APIs for professional developers. Daniel focuses on providing 'cool' and powerful templates for beginners. Although Windows website editors have had templates for years, in the Open Source world templates where introduced by Nvu, and they will be a vital part in the new Composer.

So when can we expect the first version of the new Composer? According to Daniel Glazman he expects to release version 0.1 in the first days of December! As for Nvu, it is not to be written off just yet! There has been a fork of the codebase, KompoZer, which aims at moving the project forward and eliminating bugs.

I would like to know from web-developers reading this, which web editor do they rate highest, and why?

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http://linuxappfinder.com Marsolin

I’m sorry to heaar that Nvu won’t be continuing anymore, but hopefully the replacement won’t take too long to pick up where it left off. As one of the few true WYSIWYG editors for Linux there’s a definite gap to fill.

Personally I’m a Quanta user. I find that I prefer hand coding with easy previews and I also do a lot of PHP code. Quanta makes it easy to do all of that, has wizards for bits of HTML code, and manages uploads to my FTP server with ease.

Chad
http://linuxappfinder.com
http://www.gonnalearn.com/2006/11/05/netobjects-fusion-now-produces-code-that-validates/ gonnalearn.com » Blog Archive » Netobjects Fusion now produces code that validates

[...] Standing for “new view” and supposedly pronounced “n-view” (not “envy you”), open source Nvu claims to be “a complete Web Authoring System […] to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver”. As I eventually found out, this statement is only true if you compare Nvu to the very first versions of these programs. Not only does Nvu have severe limitations when it comes to using server side script languages like PHP, it is also a very buggy piece of software, making it useless for simple tasks, too. With no bug fixes released since version 1.0, Nvu is dead by now. However, there’s an unofficial bug-fix release called KompoZer, which I didn’t have a closer look at because I’d already wasted too much time. [...]
http://manik.in/ Manik Chand

I still use NVU and Quanta for most of my web tasks. Professionally however Dreamweaver is leagues ahead of competiton. As Daniel feels, most people with whom I have contacted have written off frontpage. So even in the presence of other competitors like Adobe, it is a virtual monopoly of Macromedia. Possibly something solid should take over as the competition as it happened with MSOffice and OpenOffice, we the FLOSS lovers should have some solid arsenal to boast about.
I have dumped all graphics apps I tested in favour of Inkscape and Gimp and all my textual work is in the process of migration to OOo. Currently Quanta is a bit less stable. It crashes very often on my system. If it’s performance improves probably I would abandon using NVU altogether.

Manik.
http://robertgrant.org/wordpress Rob

Just to flag it up, if I have shell access to the web server I’m developing on I’ll probably develop in vim; if I only have ftp access I’ll probably use PSPad. They’re both great to use though.

I’ll check what I’m writing using IE and Firefox, and I’ll check it with Opera now and again as well.

Never found a WYSIWYG editor to fit, but I’m always interested in trying new ones, I’ll look out for Composer!
http://www.bl3.com.br Marcelo Mig

I use PSPad for most of the work, and sometimes NVU for quick copy & paste to generate the HTML tags more quickly. Sometimes I do this in FCKeditor, too.
Davy

I personally love Dreaweaver, but that’s only when I get to it in school. Would definally check out Composer, after all… its free.
http://atunu.blogspot.com Naser

Thank you..thank you sooo much for clarifying this to me (and also for appearing in google search results when I searched with random strings like “NVU AND Dead”). I’ve been a die-hard fan of Nvu and still use it to do my thy bidding. I was heartbroken to realize (almost, through instincts as I saw no new version of Nvu appear after 2005) that Nvu was either dead or close to morbid affairs. Now, that they have taken the decision to make a new editor called “Composer”, I can see a dim/dull light at the end of the long tunnel.

BTW, I think “Composer” might just be a codename..they might name it after a furry animal at the end, like Koala or Ewaks (I hope KDE or George Lucas won’t be offended)
http://atunu.blogspot.com Naser

Btw, I’m a Mechanical Engineering student studying at BUET and loves to rant about stuff like FOSS, OSM (Open Source Movement), Kubuntu and KDE, Mechanical Mods/Hacks, Encryption and Blogging in general.

Nice to know that you share some of my characteristics as well
http://teachtopi.com Jody Weissler

Kind of sad that NVU development is over. I used NVU for some of the early versions of http://lawithkids.com and http://teachtopia.com . I will be interested in Composer when it comes out.
http://irfanhabib.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/open-source-world-lacking-web-development-ides/ Open Source World lacking Web Development IDEs « Irfan’s /root on the Web

[...] sorely lacks: Web Development IDEs. Sure KDE comes with Quanta, and there is BlueFish, and there used to be Nvu. Each IDE has its own strengths, for example I love coding php in Quanta, BlueFish rocks at HTML [...]
Darrin Goodman

Until reading your article, I was not aware that NVU was a dead project. However, I did notice that I could not find NVU listed in my package managers for various flavors of *buntu.

Although I tried out NVU a year or more ago, Bluefish has been my primary web authoring tool when working in Linux. I have been using Dreamweaver for the last 5 years at my job (we are a Windoze shop) and have watched it develop into a really nice tool. Most of my time is spent in code view, but sometimes I find that I can be more productive when working in the wysiwyg environment of Dreamweaver. I would love to see a better IDE come out for Linux like Dreamweaver.

Have you checked out Amaya? Amaya was created by the folks at W3C and is standards compliant. It’s been a bit slow when I have used it in the past, but seems to be effective. http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

For quick edits in Linux, most of the time I will use Vim (because the terminal is usually open anyway, and Vim is pretty powerful), but will also sometimes use xJed.

Looking forward to the release of Composer.
http://www.davidhurst.co.uk David Hurst

I’m very sorry to hear Nvu is dead. Not that I used it. I tried it when it was first released, but it just did not compare to Dreamweaver. As a professional coder, I don’t use WYSIWYG at all. Dreamweaver’s code view is perfect for PHP code as it colours nicely and has PHP syntax prompting.

I realise there are other (free) PHP editors out there, but for our organisation, Dreamweaver caters for both designers and coders equally, and features enough group functionality to make it a sensible choice for us.

I can’t see any open source project ever catching up really.

Maybe it is well-suited to beginners, but for professionals it has never come close to being a solid alternative.