At 08:16 09.03.00 -0800, Dan Ingalls wrote:
>Bob Hartwig <bob at bobjectsinc.com> wrote...
>>A major
>>problem with PARTS, IMHO, was that as soon as a developer started using
>>scripts, it became impossible to accurately find all senders of a selector.

My experience which PARTS - the VisualAge way - both for Smalltalk and for
Java was that it's nearly impossible to construct larger, more complex UIs
with wiring components.  You nearly immediately lose control.

The idea, the Dolphin Smalltalk team once had for their GUI builder was
nice.  Dolphin originally should also have such kind of graphical wiring
builder and they came up with the idea to separate the concrete widgets
with their wire-board-representation.  So you could layout the real widgets
differently than their "shadows" on the wire-board and arrange that in a
way to better entangle all that lines.  Still, they decided to go for a
"normal" GUI builder.

IMHO, the way VisualBasic, Delphi and most other systems work is still
superior.  It's nice if you can graphical arrange widgets and also use that
layout as a graphical browser to open the code attached to the events but
at least I always what to see and manipulate the complete code.  That way,
I can often do changes to the UI faster than by dragging and dropping stuff.

Finding senders or implementors, BTW, was never a problem with VisualAge
and Parts.  Perhaps that problem is specific to VSE?


bye
--
Stefan Matthias Aust  //  Bevor wir fallen, fallen wir lieber auf.