Re: [rgui-dev] Jumping Right In

[Tom Sawyer]

On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 16:26, Massimiliano Mirra wrote:
> Sorry Tom, unfortunately (so to speak) the list startup coincided with
> me beginning a new job.  Eighteen hours of server administration in
> two days and I've had little time for anything else.

no worries, mate :-) how's the new gig treating you?

> I wanted to point out that:
> 
> > 2. ideally, the gui api allows for bindings on any of the model's
> > object's instance variables.
> 
> It's not really instance variables that we're after.  They represent
> the state of an object, not what we want to expose of it to the
> outside.  That's what getter methods are for.  So, your current way of
> dynamically adding code to *methods* might have implementation
> drawbacks but is conceptually the right one or one of the right ones.

hmmm...yes, you may be right about this. but i forsee a difficulty with
this. ultimately what the gui coder is after is the data stored in
instance variables. and as you say, one creates accessor methods to
provide this, but this provision is done with procedural coding in mind,
not declarative, i.e. automagical bindings. so internally, in the
core-app, how often does one use accessor methods? perhaps its a good
lesson to do so, but i know for myself i regularly adjust instance
variables directly (excluding outside of their accessor methods, which
is fine) hence the instance variables are being changed but accessor
methods are not being called. and so "automagical" changes could not be
refelected. [makes me think that maybe there really shouldn't be
instance variables, but only method-bound persistant variables instead.]

did i explain that well enough or should i give some examples?
 
> I hope to spare some time in the next few days, I've got some ideas to
> write down.

looking foward to it! thanks,
~tom