Re: SWARM Boids + Vector/Point class in GUI?

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "EW" == Eric Werk <address@hidden> writes:

EW> Does SWARM need a Vector or Point class in the gui library?

If users want the capability (as you did), Swarm does need such classes.  

Note that after the 2.0 release, one of the first things that will be
conspicuously absent from Swarm will be a Swing front end.  (Swing is latest
application kit offering from Sun's Java folks.)

But Swing is largely our problem because Swing isn't really something
that is immediately needed for the existing Swarm research community.
As it stands, the javaswarm.dll that Java environments can load will
bring in (directly or indirectly) all the tkobjc, BLT, Tk, and Tcl
support code.  Thus, Swarm models written in Java will be able to
create tkobjc widgets from development environments like Visual Age on
Windows 98; there really isn't a technical conflict between Swarm and
Tk and Java that requires a AWT/Swing frontend.  Although Swing would
improve Swarm portability (e.g. for Macs), in my view it's mostly a
buzzword-compliance thing.

Anyway, this is not to say that the current tkobjc GUI backend is a
good one.  In most cases, interactions with Tk are done via
`globalTkInterp'.  While this has the advantage of simplifying tkobjc
class implementation, it has the significant disadvantage that the Tcl
interpreter (like a clumsy, meddling bueaucrat) stands between your
ObserverSwarm and the graphics display.  This is bad for things like
Boids where fluid animation is a goal.

If I had the time and could justify it, I'd like to dump all the
tclobjc/tkobjc/BLT/Tcl/Tk crud and have a fast, lightweight `gtkobjc'
(http://www.gtk.org) or `qtobjc' (http://www.troll.no/dl/qtfree-dl.html)
frontend.

The GNOME project (http://www.gnome.org) already has a variety of
Objective C wrappers for GTK+:

  ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/objc-gtkkit
  ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/objc-gtoolkit
  ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-objc

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