Using Boo in a web app

Question

I am trying to support embedded scripting in an existing web app and would like our users to be able to write Boo scripts using an HTML editor, problem is BOO uses python-like indentation (instead of curly brackets in the more traditional languages like C# and JAVA).

Is there anyway around this ? Is there a better alternative than Boo that does not have those indentation issues?

Answer 1

One of the cool things about Boo is that the language itself is very customizable. It includes a compiler step WSABooParsingStep that makes the language whitespace-agnostic.

Brail (a view engine for Monorail and ASP.NET MVC) uses this variant of Boo, you could use it as a model for your own implementation. Brail source code is here, tests here.

Answer 2

What's the problem with the whitespace?

Using the tab key in a textarea?

There are many results on Google on how to do that.

Otherwise, could you please clarify your problem?

Answer 3

Got almost the same discussion with end users last week. People had minimum technical knowledge, mostly business oriented.

All agreed that indentation based syntax looks cleaner and feels simpler. So I plan to use indentation based scripting in my next project.