Business Application Framework

Monte Goulding monte at sweattechnologies.com
Thu Aug 13 07:00:10 EDT 2015


> To be fair it is a killer if you do not have such a front-end and want to have multiple people working in a rigorous way on a single LiveCode project ;)

True but it’s not like there aren’t other funky file formats in GitHub… storyboard, xib etc.. nasty stuff. Keep the UI as code light as possible and the code in nicely named scriptified stacks and it’s reasonable as far as I can tell. You could even put in some commit hooks to enforce a rule on the script length of objects script to force code into these libraries...
> 
> As I said, that option was discussed and I (personally) didn't think it too bad an idea in principal - but it wasn't considered a viable option at the time (it added another required layer to the system in order to ensure it met the requirements we had of it) and it did suggest that perhaps reconsidering the approach was the best way forward to producing a fully cohesive solution. It essentially reduces the git/github choice to being a storage backend which isn't really something for humans to look at. Our feeling at the time was that we really wanted a solution which was entirely 'natural' in GitHub.

Is that ever going to happen though? There’s too much intermingled data, script and UI in LC to do that I think.
> 
> 
> From an engine perspective it is probably the underlying 'stackarr' encode/decode which is the critical piece which has much wider applicability and the bit which would be high on the list to finish first. It does for stacks and objects the same thing the 'styledText' array format does for fields - it allows you to naturally manipulate the structure of stacks using arrays in script in a very direct way. Much more easily then having to introspect directly on live objects and the lcVCS or stackdir import/export could be implemented in script based upon it. The 'stackarr' concept has benefits elsewhere too - for example the project browser has to extract the information describing an object to do its job, as does the property inspector; and I know there are lots of tools out there which also replicate exactly the same process in one way or another (lcVCS just being one example).

That sounds good. Whatever works best/fastest. The actual file format is the boring part. It just needs to work whichever format it is. The IDE integration is the fun part.


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