[UI] ToolBuilder

[Colin Putney]

On Sep 8, 2007, at 9:54 AM, Bill Schwab wrote:

> You and perhaps others (too lazy to search the archives to give proper
> credit - sorry<g>) are providing excellent overviews of the various
> frameworks.  I would encourage you to slap it on a wiki if that has  
> not
> already been done.

Well, hopefully the UI team will be able to make enough progress that  
one framework will be the clear and compelling way of doing things.  
Not that I'm against documentation, but hopefully the need to  
understand so many alternatives will disappear.

> If we were going to pick one of them to build a themed version of the
> IDE, which would you pick?

Honestly, I haven't seen anything that I'm crazy about yet.  
ToolBuilder achieves its goal of letting one model work with several  
different sets of widgets, but it feels heavy and overly repetitive  
somehow. Using it seems to involve too much busy-work. I wish I could  
characterize what I don't like about it, but that's the best I can do.

There may be potential in OB's builder approach, but right now it's  
the bare minimum need to build OB, and really isn't even adequate to  
that task. Lukas has a nifty OB-based debugger that's limited in what  
it can do because the builder can't handle the complexity of the UI  
it needs.

> It might be a bad idea, but I wondering whether there is enough tool
> building in the image now that we could create a custom builder and  
> end
> up with the themed IDE "for free".

OB is approaching that point. Browsers are pretty well covered. Lukas  
has done and inspector and debugger, which are a still a bit rough  
around the edges, but getting close to usable. Workspace, transcript,  
test runner and maybe a few others are missing, but ought to be  
pretty easy to write. The OB builder already handles several  
different widget sets as well as the appearance changes in Morphic  
3.9. It wouldn't be hard to make builders that do different visual  
themes.

> I need to find a small but not trivial project to log some time in the
> IDE with Gary's changes.

Me too.

I have to say, I think tim is right. I the long run, a set of widgets  
built on Cairo and that Welsh thing would be ideal. I wish I had time  
to work on it.

Colin