Re: VB like RAD

[Tony <tonyt ptialaska net>]

gnome-filer is turning into this, to an extent.  The idea is, as you
state, to have a "tool [that] does most of the work for assembling pretty
simple database apps so that people who can't write programs can make
some passable and somewhat usuable attempts at it."

It's architecture is a bit different from VB.  Essentially, the bones of
the layout engine are in place, and it's at a point where I'm integrating
language plug-ins.  I'm taking a stab at Perl first; but I'm having a
dickens of a time, since I have never embedded a language before.  But I'm
learning.

Eventually, I expect to have a bunch of languages; and adding a language
is as simple as dropping in a plug-in.  (The widgets are plug-ins, too.
Right now, there aren't many widgets.  But once I finish the Perl plug-in
and have a working language binding, I'm going to start writing new ones.)

Anyway, there are some projects like you want.  And eventually this will
be somewhat like Oracle Developer, only with a choice of languages (Guile,
Perl, Python, C, etc).

						- Tony

On Sat, 21 Aug 1999, Christopher T. Lansdown wrote:

> Hi,
> 	Has anyone though about having some program (possibly an extended
> glade) that is a RAD tool like the VB environment?  Something where you
> place the widgets then double-click on them to input or edit the code
> which is executed when the widget is actually used (such as when the
> button just put down is clicked on)?  Possibly even in perl because it has
> some database stuff and is a weakly typed language?  This way people could
> write slow, buggy programs just as easily in Linux as in windows.
> 	I'm neither volunteering for this project nor asking for it, just
> wondering what people think of such an idea.  Would such a tool have
> merit, do you think?  As far as I can follow the hype, there are two types
> of RAD - one is the stuff like gnome which provides a lot of functionality
> in a few function calls (I really love gnome_error_dialog("Error!"); :-))
> and the stuff where the tool does most of the work for assembling pretty
> simple database apps so that people who can't write programs can make some
> passable and somewhat usuable attempts at it.  While gnome answers the
> first pretty well, I think, the second doesn't seem to be much addressed.
> What do people think?  Has this topic already been addressed, or does
> anyone know of any good papers on the subject?
> 	-Chris