On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 21:40:36 -0400, Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Cees de Groot <cg at cdegroot.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:49:23 -0400, Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > Additionally, the UI abstraction task is fine but seems relatively
> > > unimportant compared to these other items.  How muh code, really, is
> > > going to find it useful to target 5 different UI's?
> >
> > Ehh... mostly all of the development tools?
> 
> As you know, those already work in all the UI's.  Thus a UI abstraction
> does not help them; it only pretties them up.  Pretty code is nice but
> should not be on the top of this priority list.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "all the development tools". 
One concrete outcome of ToolBuilder so far is that the Monticello UI
suddenly works (or mostly works) in MVC and Tweak, which it didn't
before.  And I'm pretty sure that not all of the browsers had been
ported to Tweak yet, or the TestRunner, and now they suddenly work
too.  And very few of these currently work in Seaside, but ToolBuilder
will make it easier for all of them to.  And then there's wxSqueak. 
So you say "those already work in all the UIs", but you actually mean
something like "the System Browsers and Debugger already work in both
Morphic and MVC", which is a much, much weaker statement.

But even if none of this were true - if we're serious about
partitioning and stripping the image, getting rid of any dependencies
between the Tools package and the various UI packages is surely a
worthwhile goal.

Maybe it's not the absolute highest priority for the community (if we
can measure such a thing), but I think it's a great thing for people
who care about it to invest some energy into.

Avi