Change the description (GitHub meta data) to say: web IDE + offline-ready

[Naereen]

Hi there again,

I just realized that the description was a little bit misleading

An efficient, intuitive and cross-platform Ocaml IDE

Maybe it could be changed to

A small but efficient, intuitive and responsive OCaml IDE right in your browser! Ships OCaml v4.08.1, interpreter by your browser (so it works offline!), compiled with js_of_ocaml.

It's longer, but it makes things clearer:

• "small" : it's a very nice web editor, but calling it a "IDE" when it has just edit/save and run is a bit too much ;

• "responsive": inform users that it should work well on smartphone (note: it's not yet good for me, but I'm finishing a modification of the page and its style to have a better experience on small screens) ;

• "right in your browser": very very important to explain right in the description that it's an in browser IDE;

• "Ships OCaml v4.08": this can help promote the fact that it's recent, when compared to other pages that have older OCaml versions (thinking of mine with OCaml 4.01);

• "interpreter by your browser": it's an awesome feature!

• "(so it works offline!)" : it doesn't work yet on mobile phones I think (or at least, not mine), but it should work fine on modern desktop/laptop browser,

• "compiled with js_of_ocaml": that's not mandatory.

Of course this is a just a suggestion, feel free to pick only some of the items I suggest to add. But it should at least make these points clear :ok !

[jbdoderlein]

This is a good idea ! It's true that this is not a complete IDE today, but I have some idea to make it better (autocompletion is one of the next feature i want to implement)

[Naereen]

Great thanks for the update.

I will applaud if you obtain autocompletion. But that's not vital. It's quite hard to implement correctly...

[Naereen]

I'm trying to get my head around service workers and app manifest... to make it installable as offline app on mobiles.

[jbdoderlein]

I've created a web dev branch on the repo and invite you as collaborator, so it's easier to work and make some modification Also if you want, I have also created a mini discord server if you :)

[Naereen]

I'll see in a few days.

This morning I managed to write a Progressive Web App (PWA) manifest JSON file (extending the one that I found, afterward, in the src/icon folder). I successfully installed the website as a "native PWA" on my Android phone. It works, but... so many things are not perfect!

• no offline support - service workers are required for this!
• despite my CSS hack to make it more responsive, it's not very easy to use;
• lots of tiny things don't work as expected on CodeMirror, like copy-pasting etc. I wrote a ~12 lines example, and I was already tired of it... the only known native OCaml for Android, OCaml Toplevel for Android (2011, OCaml v3.12.0) is 10-year-old but so smooth and easy to use.
• the save and setting buttons become quickly hidden?
• interpreting a sentence makes the virtual keyboard hide and come back quickly, cluttering the display;
• the editor highlights the current line/statement that will be executed, and that's perfect. On desktop, it displays nicely, on my phone it removed the syntax highlighting of the editor, as soon as I had more than one statement.

I'll stop there... This is not meant to be aggressive, just to give some feedback about my experiments. So far, if I were to teach using OCaml, I'll still be recommending to use OCaml Toplevel for Android (2011, OCaml v3.12.0) despite its age and old OCaml version.

[Naereen]

And I got a reply from its author, the source code is no longer usable, and he recommends that if someone wants to build a native OCaml editor for Android (or iOS) they should start from scratch.

This really is something I would like to do, but it's also a very low priority, so I'll see in a few months.