Squeak textbox and events.

Keith Hodges K.Hodges at ftel.co.uk
Thu May 17 12:28:58 UTC 2001


Joseph Pelrine wrote:

> Well, I can't say much, since I don't consider myself a Squeaker, but (as
> someone who earns a living programming Smalltalk XP-style) I wouldn't waste
> my time trying to do "cool" but unnecessary things (XML/DOM parsers, B-Tree
> implementations etc.). 90% of the structured text we see in text panes is
> method code. If you want color coding, pretty printing etc. for this, why
> don't you just use the built-in parser or the RefactoringBrowser parser as
> a base? That's the way these things were implemented in VisualAge (see VA
> Assist) or VisualWorks (see Travis Grigg's code highlighter).

Your points may well apply within the realm of the development environement
however in more general terms, I beg to differ.

The purpose of the code editing tools is as a bootstrap for the projects that
people are really trying to develop. Their existance and the fact that 90% of
the use of text boxes is in the coding tools is not really that relevant.

The question is what about the other 10%? 90% of requirements may be easy, but
currently by simple mathematics there are 10% of requirements are virtually
impossible.This is an impasse that could use some chipping away at.

Therefore what is relevant in XP terms would be a "customer" requiring the
ability to handle large quantities of text with styling, tagging and editing
features. And the simplist thing that could possibly work does not currently
provide the functionality, therefore there is a driver for some of these
"cool" and necessary things! Having got those things developed, their
usefulness in the development environment would be a bonus.

I am such a customer. Of course if I was to do the simplest thing that could
possibly work then I may be up and running far quicker. To do this I would run
a two pass process rendering a complex data model into the existing simple one
which is then rendered to the screen. Then I would need a complex series of
hooks so that editing and edits carried out with the limited editing tools can
be reflected back into the complex underlying data model. Having done this I
would then consider a major refactoring of the entire framework so that my
complex data model can be rendered and etited directly. Where do we end up...
A better framework for text editing and display.

any takers ?

Keith





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