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Some somewhat cooler thoughts...


From: Pete French
Subject: Some somewhat cooler thoughts...
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 23:13:30 +0000

Hmm, looking back on today I think I might have been arguing in a somewhat
unhelful  way for part of today, for which I appologies. I just read through
a number of the posts again, and decided to write something a bit calmer.

So, here goes...

Renaissance is (or will be when complete as far as I am aware) capable of
fencapsulating all the verbait information that is currently held in .gorm
and .gmodel files. Maybe the impression was given that this isnt the case,
and thats what bothered people.

If Gorm were modified to save to .gsmarkup files rather than .gorm files
then things would behave precisely as they currently do to the best of
my knoledge (if I am talking crap,  Nicola can put me straight - its not my
library, Im just an entheusiastic and very apperciative developer).

So, given this is the case, I dont see what is lost by moving over to using
them. Note that I am not talking about adding anything to Gorm to allow it
to edit the autolayout facilities of .gsmarkup files, merely that it saves
the current "exact position" information in this form.

This doesnt loose anything - but it does give us two big wins. The first
being instant portability. You can just type 'make' and away it goes under
OS X. Yes, the interface will need tweaking and maye re-laying out to make it
look nice... but it allows you to start (instantly) from the position of a
running, fully functional application. Imagine also if nib2gmodel was
turned into a nib2gsmarkup utility - you then ahve a way of migrating
code backwards and orwards across the three platforms with relative ease.

I know some pople dont consider cross-platform to be important, but if
we can get it "for free" without taking away from those people who dont care
then thats surely a win ? You could even then run Gorm under OSX. I'm also
trying to get it running under OS42 so then theres a way of supporting legacy
systems too.

Secondly it allows those of us who prefer to use autolayout to do so. Without
disrupting the lives of anyone else. Thats also a bit bonus for me writing new
code.

This also then outs us in the positiong of ahving a single file format across
all platforms. Currently we have .gmodel, .gorm and .gsmarkup - all trying
to do rougly the same job. Whats that buying us ? Why not just decide to
adopt a single cross-platform standard and use it for everything ?

For me that sums up the pro side of the discussion - and I admit that I dont
really understand what the con side iis at all .... unless I am wrong about
Renaissance being perfectly capable of ding everything that .gorm files
currently do.

-bat. [sorry if I raised any temperatures earlier today...]




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