Re: Scripting in Gnome

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

> Well only a small percentage of Excel users use VBA.  My father uses
> Excel extensively but only to make reports.  I have a friend who uses
> VBA to do Health Care insurance calculations, but no one in his office
> even goes near it.  Microsoft in the past has had no problems with
> changing VB so that might just happen when Excel goes .Net.  So one can
> go for a dying niche market and clone VBA (a task that has failed at
> least with respect to a VB clone) or one could look to the future and
> use a working Mono.  I don't see why class libraries couldn't be created
> to emulate VBA calls.  Then again I am no expert in VB except for some
> test scripts I wrote as an E*Trade intern some years back.  So I am not
> sure how extensively different VB.Net is to VBA. 

I have done a small conversion of vb to vb.net before and I can say that
every other line needed changing. There are significant changes between
the languages although they are trivial in most cases. I do not believe
you can just wrap them up in classes as MS would have done so already. 

> 
> Right now I think this discussion is getting a bit off topic from being
> Scripting in Gnome to being Scripting in Gnumeric.   Perhaps it should
> move to the Gnumeric list, dev-tools list or the language binding list. 

Not so because I am developing a Gnome scripting engine for all gnome
apps.

To sum up what I am creating :

*A non-visual bonobo object that any gnome application can embed.

*It will have properties for selecting a grammar (these will be xml
files). One advantage of using xml here is if say the VBA implementation
did not support a function  that you needed then you could just edit the
xml file to add support for that function. 

*It will have properties for specifying the application specific objects
using xml (I.E. in Excel you have the Application, Workbook and Range
objects. For something like Rhythmbox you might want objects for
playlists etc)

*The bonobo component will generate events/signals whenever an
application's objects properties or methods are used in the script. That
way the application can interact with the script engine. 

* The component will parse and syntax check scripts prior to converting
them to python.


A future bonobo object that I would like to create as well would also
include a mini IDE that can be embedded into any Gnome app. This would
use things like Scintilla to provide syntax highlighting for the
selected grammar. Also provide debugging for the scripts etc.

jamie.

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