Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Jan-2009, Pedro L. Lucas wrote:

| We need your help to do that. You (or all togheter) must define an
| interface for IDEs.
| If you don't do that, every IDE will make its own interface ==> Chaos

Why should this be my job?  I don't personally care that much about
using an IDE for Octave, so I'm fairly certain that I would not be the
right person for this job.  Instead, I think the people who care about
writing and using IDEs should be involved in the discussion, and
should ultimately be the ones to write most of the code.  That doesn't
mean I won't have an opinion about what design is good or bad, or what
should be included in Octave, but I doubt that I will be making it a
priority to come up with something.

| If I start to send patches, these patches will work only for QtOctave,
| because I will define my own interface.

What prevents you from designing something more general?

| XML interface sounds good. Easy to use and can be used from all
| programming languajes. I think thqt QtOctave can be modified to use it
| and so do other IDEs.
| 
| What do you think?

Does XML do a good job for large amounts of binary data (like a large
double precision floating point array, which is something that is
common in Octave)?  If not, then I'm not sure it's really a good
choice.

Why should the IDE run separately from Octave?  It seems to me that it
would be better for it to be more closely integrated.  For example,
running in a separate thread.

jwe