About OmniBrowser code :)

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Tue Dec 7 21:01:10 UTC 2004


Hi colin

I just wanted to say that I was quite impressed by the overall quality 
of the OB implementation:
lot of tests, most of the time class comments....(would it be possible 
to have some of the non trivial classes
a bit covered too).
keep doing this good job. I cannot comment on the way to describe 
browsers but this seems quite powerful.
and certainly a good framework for the next generations of tools that 
will certainly follow :)

I have a few questions:
	- What is the difference between OB-Standard and OmniBrowser:
	I guess that one is the framework and the other is the standard code 
browser?

	- so if I try to understand:
		A browser is described by a metaGraph.  This metaGraph is described 
by node and edges.
		A node can be manipulated by actions
		which represent what can be done on a specific node. A node will wrap 
the code entity.

		It is not clear yet to me, how we represent state transition (for 
example, how to pass
		from "we are editing a method, to the method is compiled so the 
browser does not have to
		tell us that we will lose your code if we click on a method category 
for example".


	- why OBCodeNode, OBClassVariableNode are totally empty?

	- is OB using the systemNotifier mechanism?

	- why the OBMetaGraphBuilder does not have any instance methods? I 
understand that this is a metagraph Repository
	but without methods or state I do not understand.

	- what is an OBDefinition? Answer should also go in comments :)

	- how can I open an OBHierarchyBrowser?

	- I imagine that we really need the notion of environment to be able 
to scope the search
	senders... in the image, and for example SystemNavigation could use 
such search environment
	and also for the rbengine. Do you think that OBEnvironmentNode could 
be one candidate,
	may be the namespace implementation we are doing could serve also that 
purpose.




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