Pre-Fab Profile Set?

[Marielle Lange]

>> Is the desire for such a tool prevalent enough to translate into a  
>> working tool?
>>

David Bovill wrote:


> Well due to the lack of "stack granularity" in my work - it is a  
> little hard to share right now - but the tools were actually built  
> a couple of years ago. Right now like you I see the problem as a  
> mix of "social" but also "tool level". So the first tasks for me are:
>
>     1) Get a few people working and and maintaining the same wiki
>     2) Integrating the wiki into the Rev environment
>     3) Getting the social and business incentives right - see  
> "ransom" discussion earlier on the list.
>
> Given that i guess the CVS / subversion tools with the object /  
> handler chunking would have something to be built upon. This  
> effectively means building a "market mechanism" for re-useable  
> components - stacks and more granular if needed. The focus is to  
> reduce the cost (in terms of productivity as well as real cash) for  
> aquiring and using these components.
>
> The idea is to use a secure digital currency that you can earn and  
> use to pay others to work on your projects. You would be able to  
> buy and possibly later sell this currency, if you did not have the  
> time to earn it. When the ransom for a feature / component was paid  
> the resulting code would be released open source.
>

Dan Shafer wrote:

> I've been doing a lot of thinking and exploring the issue of code/ 
> component reuse in Rev the last week or so. Yeah, I know; I really  
> need to get out more.
>
> It occurred to me that Profiles, which are designed to deal with  
> the need for various versions of a stack/app in different languages  
> and with different OS deployments, are probably the "right" (i.e.,  
> Rev-preferred) way to deal with the few but sticky cross-platform  
> issues we face all the time such as fonts. Then it occurred to me  
> to wonder if anyone has written a sort of pre-fab set of profiles  
> that could be integrated into a Rev app so that the fonts, field  
> spacing and other issues that crop up from time to time would be  
> handled semi-automagically at runtime.
>

Funny, I have been working on this this week. Very happy with the  
results.

Construction of a visual interface in a xul/laslzo way.
One document that gives information about the way basic rev controls  
need to be drawn (within rev)
Another document that gives information about how the widgets defined  
into a xul kind of file translate to rev controls. I used the word  
widget rather than control because you can define elements that  
correspond to a group of controls rather than a single one (for  
instance, have a "go url" button that goes to the url defined in a  
neighboring text box).
Another document that defines the visual interface and where each  
widget should appear on the screen.

Defaults are defined at each level. They are overwritten at the next  
level. Very easy localisation. Very easy access to data stored in a  
xml file or a sql database.

To clarify. File 1 (rev controls properties) is development  
environment dependent. But File 2 and 3 are DE independent. You only  
need to rewrite File 1 (and the libraries that understand how to draw  
controls given the properties defined in this file) to carry your  
full application over another environment.



> Has anyone done such a thing? Any ideas for approaching this?  
> Anyone want to offer to provide something like this? I don't have a  
> current need for it but it seems to me that it could almost become  
> a requisite part of any new app I write that's destined for multi- 
> platform deployment.
>

David (Bovill) is playing with similar ideas. Xavier too at another  
level.

Can we create a working group? I am interested in collaboration but  
not in making everything widely available right now.

Marielle
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguist

Alternative emails: mlange at blueyonder.co.uk, M.Lange at ed.ac.uk
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