[DOCS] MagicBook

Chris Burkert christian.burkert at s2000.tu-chemnitz.de
Tue Mar 25 21:24:44 UTC 2003


Hi

I thought about the MagicBook and had the following ideas starting with 
Göran's:

_Projects_
Projects are nice, but they are also a view. Thinking about MVC concepts 
the content of the MagicBook should be a model, not a view. But we could 
allow to integrate projects by wrapping them.

_Star Browser_
A great browser, but there could be more than one UI. Why not a 
Webfrontend for the contents of the Book or anything you may think of.

_SqueakMap_
perfect

But why shouldn't we go some steps further. This is my idea:
The Chapters are Models but they can wrapp things like projects. Star 
Browser or any other browser (e.g. a comanche module) handles Views like 
projects, html or txt. If the chapter is something like a xml DOM (this 
is just my first idea) we could transform the content of it to any 
output format, Website, Project, PS, PDF, TXT so that the Browser can 
handle it. If we create a couple of Output classes for those formats, it 
would be quite simple to tell the chapter to render it's contents using 
this or that Output class. Output classes could be the way like 
HVHtmlBuilder is, which is part of HttpView written by Göran Hultgren. 
If those classes provide a common protocol it would be transparent for 
the chapter that doesn't have to know to what output it should render 
itself. If a Output format doesn't provide a special feature (like 
inputs in txt) the class does nothing. If a chapter isn't a model (for 
example a project that is wrapped by the Chapterclass) it could answer 
that it is only available in this or that output format. There could be 
used caching to reduce the work of squeak. We could register users, give 
them permissions for each chapter and allow them to log in and work on 
the contents.

I have hundreds of ideas and it would be nice if we do a little 
brainstorming on this.

            ------------------------
            | Your special Browser |
            ------------------------
                      |
    ---------------   |   -------------------
    | StarBrowser |   |   | Comanche Module |
    ---------------   |   -------------------
                 \    |    /
           ---------------------------
           |        MagicBook        |
           ---------------------------
              /    |     |      |   \
----------------  |  --------  |  ---------------
| Chapter Tree |  |  | User |  |  | Permissions |
----------------  |  --------  |  ---------------
                   |            |
      ------------------    ------------------------------------
      | Output Classes |    | Your idea which I have forgotten |
      ------------------    ------------------------------------

Just my idea of a framework.

Regards
            Chris Burkert
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Student of applied Computer Science at Chemnitz University of Technology
      http://www.chrisburkert.de/            chris at chrisburkert.de
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have
  C++ in mind." - Alan Kay --> http://www.whysmalltalk.com/



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