Re: bond

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp martianrock com>]

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 01:04, Dru wrote:
> Hello I've been on this list for a quite a while but dont say much. 
> For the last 2 years I've been working making a GTK work nicely with 
> databases and allowing for the rapid application development of 
> databases under gnome.  At the moment I have a large collection of 
> libraries for doing all the work. You can create reports, and complex 
> GTK front ends to databases. The whole thing is bound together by XML 
> files. My idea for getting this to work would be to use anjuta/scoffold
I just want to make sure you inserstand that Anjuta and Scaffold are two
different projects. Anjuta is teh full featured IDE while Scaffold is
the still Alpha (yet very usable) modular IDE.  You should choose which
one you wish to target though I would say targetting Scaffold would be
best because a) I'm a developer ;-) and b) the modular and Alpha nature
means you can experiment a bit more.  Anjuta is becoming more modular
and at some point I hope Scaffold plugins will be usable in Anjuta.

> as an ide for building the applications and maybe modify glade2 to store 
> additional information used by bond to establish database information.  
I would work on glade 3 since it will hopefully be the next generation
embedable UI designer.  But then again this is another highly alpha
codebase.  So you need to decide you want to make the next generation
database IDE or do you want to get to stable as fast as possible.

> Before I ported to GTK2 bond worked well with glade but at the moment it 
> doesn't, I'll fix it at some point.

> Anyway at the moment creating a bond application is a bit difficult as 
> you have to create complex makefiles and write configuration files as 
> well as coding all the xml files for doing the work, so I was looking at 
> tying it in with the anjuta application wizard if its ok with you guys.
Ok with me though I am not convinced this is an application wizard sort
of thing.  Why complex makefiles?  Do you use pkg-config?  That should
greatly simplify the makefiles.

I havn't gotten around to writting this up but I belive wizzards are
inheriently wrong for IDE's.  It is like driving a kid to the mall for
the first time, giving them a list of things to buy and then telling
them to find their own way home.  In my opinion if a person uses a
library it should be added to the makefile.  A person should not have to
decide all at once they want to use database functionality.  If they use
it then it should be intergated at that point.  What happens if somone
is writting an app that uses flat files as a datastore and they all of a
sudden relize they want to use a database.  Should they have to create a
new project to do so?  Wizards are great starting points but an IDE
needs to be able to help out the programmer along the way.  Database
library integration should not be a starting point but ongoing guide to
the programmer.

>  
> I can create the logo etc but it does mean you'll have more than one 
> page of options for creating a projects.  I can do the coding if someone 
> points me in the right direction with whats files it resides on any 
> design considerations you want. I could also help in getting debian 
> support in the application wizard.
gnome-build module in CVS I belive holds the wizzards for Scaffold projects.  
I could be wrong and it might be in the main Anjuta2 (Anjuta2 is the old name of Scaffold.  
We are in the process of changing the name because as I said Anjuta and Anjuta2 are actualy 
two seperate projects).

After I am done with the rename I plan on working on GObject code
generation which will flesh out my ideas on interactive code
generation.   It would be great if you were interested in such a route
for the database integration.  Can you send me over a small example of
how your libraries work?  Things such as what code needs to be added to
the sources and makefiles would allow me to make some design suggestions
if you would like.

I hope you choose Scaffold to integrate Bond into.  Database tools would
be great.

--
J5