What does SketchUp 2013 do for developers?

thomthom

@unknownuser said:

no external installation required, full library available

You mean full library as in the Ruby Standard Library?

danielbowring

@thomthom said:

You mean full library as in the Ruby Standard Library?

Yes.

thomthom

@adamb said:

A fundamental problem Team SU need to figure is how you offer flexibility/extensibility while discouraging devs bolting on stuff that compromises performance. Perhaps some Extension Warehouse QA should have some "Performance Gates" that are required to go through?

I hope the QA checks observer events, context menu handlers and validation procs.

AdamB

@unknownuser said:

@thomthom said:

Not following you on this one either. It's [ruby on rails] a web-framework. How much would that benefit SketchUp programming?

Ah, but if we dropped[sup:33hprjh2]†[/sup:33hprjh2] window.load for javascript<->ruby communication and used xhrs instead, having a web framework could be really useful! That said, rails (and most frameworks) for that matter might be a bit bloated - given the situation many features would likely never be used. What would likely be better would be to implement something like wsgi or rack and then allow developers to deal with requests appropriately (and hopefully a dominant method/framework will arise, which can then hopefully be made available on the extension warehouse as a requirement/dependency library)

I build a nano-webserver (1k code) into my tech both for debugging (point a browser at it to query stuff) and to better support integrated solutions. You can see an example by running LightUp Player and pointing your browser at http://localhost;8080

It would be straight forward to build a well-known socket into SU for WebKit comms.

Or would it better to finish off their original (not unreasonable) approach of having a skp:// scheme handler?

Adam

danielbowring

@adamb said:

It would be straight forward to build a well-known socket into SU for WebKit comms.

Or would it better to finish off their original (not unreasonable) approach of having a skp:// scheme handler?

Adam

http would probably be better because it would "just work" on things like jQuery.ajax. Just bind listen on a particular port (if already taken, just keep trying the next one). Them it's just of matter of the client getting the information - for pages served by it it is as simple as document.location,, and for remote stuff maybe include it in the user-agent or some other standard header (like X-SketchUp-Server: localhost:8042). Then you're communication channel is good to go!

Edit: Idea: let plugin developers define subdomains (implemented by local DNS rules). That way we can separate out authors content over a fake domain. (eg, author.sketchup-dialog.com, then just use the header to tell the port it is listening on.

AdamB

Nice.

And I guess it would be trivial to map skp:// requests into this automagically.

tomot

NOTHING! Zero! Nada!

One of the main problems I have, is verifying that the script runs in SketchUp.

1. Doing a load "Ruby.rb" in the Ruby Console does NOT always clear out the previous values. Hence I don't even bother to use it anymore. Its sheer insanity to constantly reload SU, then the script to see if the script runs. After 8 hours of programming a Ruby script, I spend more time doing 1. then actual programming.

If anyone here has ever written code in GDL for ArchiCad, you will discover that all the GLD code runs within the Code ArchiCad window, while the results of the code run within a 3D ArchiCad Window. Any changes in the code are immediately translated to the 3d window, while all code errors are immediately flagged in the Code window. You never have to quit ArchiCad while your writing code in GDL. ArchiCad also provides a standard user interface under which all user code is displayed and runs.

Now that's what I call an API!

dacastror

In my opinion there are several things that are doing well in Trimble
But I see a couple of errors:

when opening sketchup 8 will not get a notice to upgrade to 2013 version (because of this, they will lose millions of users)
in "Sketchup 2013 free" entities transformations performed more slowly than "Sketchup 2013 pro" and "Sketchup 8". These things are really serious errors

(google translator)

Rich O Brien

You were always told to update regardless of the version for the last few releases.

And there's no performance difference between Make and Pro from what I can tell.

thomthom

@dacastror said:

when opening sketchup 8 will not get a notice to upgrade to 2013 version (because of this, they will lose millions of users)

It does update. Unless you have a firewall that blocks access.

@dacastror said:

in "Sketchup 2013 free" entities transformations performed more slowly than "Sketchup 2013 pro" and "Sketchup 8". These things are really serious errors

Got a reproducible sample case for this?