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)
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