On 7/5/05, Blake <blake at kingdomrpg.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 04:11:29 -0700, Avi Bryant <avi.bryant at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> >> In just about any professional desktop development tool today, the
> >> process of displaying DB data in form or grid format is nigh
> >> automatic. I can do it without a line of code, and I can do it even if
> >> I've never seen the tool in my life.
> >
> > And then what? I'm not challenging your statement,


I think Smalltalk (and Squeak in particular) was designed to make simple 
things easy and hard things possible. When compared to MS Access, Visual 
Studio .NET, and JAVA I think Smalltalk definitely excels at the later 
(making hard things possible), but I think it fails in many areas at the 
former (to its disadvantage). Data aware grids should be easier to develop 
in Smalltalk than in .NET, right? (in theory)

I used to write more business apps than I do now, but grids o' data are 
really important in many business apps (as uninspiring as they are). Just 
look at how important MS Excel is to modern businesses. It is just a virtual 
machine solely dedicated to running and persisting grids.

At one time I worked up a Squeak grid (SGrid on
squeak.saltypickle.com<http://squeak.saltypickle.com>)
that is still available. It is not a two-way data aware control, but it is 
one-way (meaing it will read from a collection and populate a grid). It also 
doesn't handle super large data sets too well and would need a paging 
scheme. It served the purpose at the time but needs more work.

Anyways, I am not necessarily trying to toot my own horn here other than to 
say that I think a "grid team" should work up or continue the work done by 
many to develop a solid grid in Morphic. I think Squeak (and Morphic in 
particular) could have a super whiz bang grid that makes others absolutely 
jealous of us Squeakers. Any takers on building a super grid? I'd be happy 
to contribute if others could assist, but grid development is hard work even 
in Squeak.

Lastly, here's a thought. What if we don't ever have a whiz bang grid in 
Squeak? What if we don't have such cool pedestrian components such that we 
don't ever seem to attract the thousands of uninspired business app 
developers? Do we care? What are we missing out on? Why are we wanting to 
attract the common business app power user to Squeak so he/she can slap 
together a data editing program with little or no code? (Sorry all business 
app developers, I am often developing a business app too so I'm counting 
myself in this bunch) After all we have MS Excel for that and it runs on 
multiple platforms (any OS that starts with MS and Mac too). I am not trying 
to incite a riot here, but just curious as to our motivations?

Regards,

John 

-- 
It's easy to have a complicated idea. It's very very hard to have a simple 
idea. -- Carver Mead
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