[UI] ToolBuilder

[tim Rowledge]

On 9-Sep-07, at 7:00 PM, Colin Putney wrote:

>
> On Sep 9, 2007, at 6:25 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:
>
>> On 9-Sep-07, at 2:59 PM, Gary Chambers wrote:
>>
>>> As far as I see, the "Pluggables" seem to extend the flexibility...
>> One of the original reasons for plugability of views was so that  
>> several views of the same kind could be connected to the same  
>> model; without having pluggable selectors (or the alternative  
>> pluggable adaptors as proposed by the Tek gang in about 1985) you  
>> would have to have a separate subclass of list view for each pane  
>> in a browser.
>
> Right. Without pluggability, you're limited to one view per model.

Well strictly speaking one view of any particular type in practice,  
since most implementors end up using selectors like #getList and  
#getText etc :-)

> By making the view-model protocol to be different for each view,  
> the model can react differently to different view. In OmniBrowser I  
> found that even this level of flexibility wasn't enough. I found I  
> wanted a variable number of views, which pluggability couldn't  
> accommodate.

Hmm, I'm not sure I see how pluggability would let you down here. Can  
you remember any details? I'm curious.

> So I went back to the one-view-per-model pattern, with the main  
> model holding a collection of sub-models and communicating through  
> them.
That can work too; in fact it's pretty much what Tweak formalised (a  
proper class of graphical model as well as the application/domain  
model etc) and really it is what the Browser class is/was fumbling  
toward. I even wrote a paper on it in the dark ages around '88 or so.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"How many Motie Mediators does it take to chage a lightbulb?" "Are  
you insane? Only Crazy Eddie would want to change *anything*!"