Re: STK program development tools

From: Erick Gallesio <eg_at_kaolin.unice.fr>
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 22:46:35 +0100

> "Harvey J. Stein" writes

> Also, amib contains code that can be used as part of an inspector,
> since it's capable of poping up an editing window on an STklos object.
>
> Ideally, one would also package up a set of editor routines which one
> could call explicitely (so that if a variable contains a file name,
> color, font spec, event spec, etc, one could call the
> filename/color/font/event editor instead of the string-editor).
>

Of course, i think that this is this code which must be used since it
is very general (it is based on the STklos MOP and is not dependant from Tk)
This is not the part which is annoying, in fact inspecting object
is the easier task. The problem is that the inspector must be rewritten for
all the other primitive types, since it has become unmaintenable.
Moreover, it was not coherent with environments.


> Then, one could also have a widget-editor as well as an object-editor,
> where the widget-editor recognizes certain slots as containing colors
> specs, or font specs, etc, and invokes the more specialized editors
> when a slot is double-clicked on.

 This is a good idea; Visual Tcl (a Tcl/Tk interface builder) uses this kind of
specialized editor for Tk options (info on Visual Tcl can be found at
http://www.neuron.com/stewart/vtcl/). We can imagine to do this for instances
which are descendant of <Tk-object>. This can be easily achieved using
inheritance on the function used by the object editor.


> This is all pretty simple and straight forward to do using the code
> in amib as a starting point.
>

Yes amib was done for that, after all.

> BTW, a long time ago I submitted to Erik an enhanced version of amib
> which allows editing groups of widgets, and included a widget
> hierarchy displayer (i.e. - buttons x, y & z are in frame w, which is
> in the top level), but it seems that this code never made it into the
> standard distribution. I suppose this isn't too surprising, because
> although (IMO) I gave amib some pretty important functionality, I
> hacked the changes into amib in a pretty ugly way.

The problem was not that the code was too ugly, but that I'm too lazy. If
I remmeber well, I have modified rather heavily just when you send me your
patches, and your modifications were not directly integrable in my new
version. BTW, I'm not sure that I have the last version since I don't
remember that your code contain a widget hierarchy displayer, or perhaps I had
missed it).

> If anyone's
> interested in my version (based on amib v0.2, and which I think
> doesn't run under the newest version of STk), particularly in folding
> my version into the latest amib, I'd be happy to send them the code.
>

Please can you send me your code again. I have heard of a student project
here at Nice whose aim is to improve amib. I suppose that your code could
be useful for them.

                -- Erick
Received on Thu Jan 16 1997 - 22:49:21 CET

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Mon Jul 21 2014 - 19:38:59 CEST