Glamour

On 11/4/10, Stéphane Ducasse <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yes, the aim is different.
Glamour is a browser constructing tool wheras ToolBuilder is a UI
interface building tool -- however mostly browser types. Lower level
but still not too much more to write.....


> Now do you have all the polymorph widgets described as toolbuilder spec?
> Because this is the problem.

No, but for simpler browsers it does not matter.

The nice thing about Glamour is that it has these graphical
hierarchical views with an indication how 'heavy' the nodes are. Very
useful.

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Hello Tudor

On 11/4/10, Tudor Girba <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The Glamour API is intended to be an internal DSL. This is particularly
> useful for people that do not know Smalltalk :)
>
> What parts of the API is not user friendly for you?

At this moment I cannot say more that I would prefer simpler
statements. A more procedural builder oriented style. Not everything
in one big statement with nested blocks.

You have the graphical layout and the connections and I would just
like to describe that in a sequence of statements. Not in a hierarchy
of nested blocks. Less implicit semantics.


> Regarding the ToolBuilder vs Glamour issue, ToolBuilder is a User Interface
> framework, while Glamour is a browser engine.

Sure. But as mentioned above for less complex cases it is the same.
The initial effort you have to put into learning the Glamour DSL is
still considerable.


To give you an idea, with the
> ToolBuilder, you place buttons in a window.

Yes and no. You take an existing example as a template and change
method names. There are many examples.

E.g. a Two pane browser, a three pane browser, with and without text
window and so on...

 With Glamour, you define the
> data flow and the way data is presented at a higher level.

For a browser the data flow is often pretty standard.



> Regarding examples, what kind of things are you interested in?

More simple examples which do something useful. Just to get the flavor
of the DSL.

A more complex one:
An example where I can navigate a network. I see all the neighbors of
a node (as a list and as graph). A node has a content window.
Navigation buttons forth and back.

Some real world examples outside the Smalltalk class hierarchy, for
example a WordNet browser   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet


> Cheers,
> Doru


Thank you for answering and keeping up this interesting work.

--Hannes


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Hi,

On 4 Nov 2010, at 17:50, Hannes Hirzel wrote:

:). I do not understand what you mean by less implicit semantics. The construction of the Glamour model is pretty straightforward. The blocks are nothing but a strategy to avoid subclassing when in prototyping mode.

>> Regarding the ToolBuilder vs Glamour issue, ToolBuilder is a User Interface
>> framework, while Glamour is a browser engine.
>
> Sure. But as mentioned above for less complex cases it is the same.
> The initial effort you have to put into learning the Glamour DSL is
> still considerable.

For trivial cases, you should not need much. I had several programmers that do not know Smalltalk that managed to build some simple browsers after half a day of training (including learning Smalltalk syntax, tools and so on).

> To give you an idea, with the
>> ToolBuilder, you place buttons in a window.
>
> Yes and no. You take an existing example as a template and change
> method names. There are many examples.

:)

> E.g. a Two pane browser, a three pane browser, with and without text
> window and so on...
>
> With Glamour, you define the
>> data flow and the way data is presented at a higher level.
>
> For a browser the data flow is often pretty standard.

I do not subscribe to this statement :). There are abstract patterns, but other than that, we typically need to treat each data structure and each use case in a different way.

The problem with browsers is that even when they initially start small, they tend to grow over time. And when updating and data propagation is not approached systematically, they soon become difficult to manage. What Glamour does is to decouple the data flow from the presentation strategy. One of the things that came out of this work was the approach to think of a browser primarily as a data flow, and only secondarily as a way to present the data. Perhaps from what exists now, it is still not  that obvious what the approach brings, but I am confident that it will make a significant different in the not-so-long-run.

There are several examples of browsing more complex pieces of information in Moose. For example, by doing:
- MooseMetaBrowser open
- MoosePanel open

> Thank you for answering and keeping up this interesting work.

Thanks for asking. Actually, if you have more punctual questions about Glamour, we would welcome more questions.

Cheers,
Doru


--
www.tudorgirba.com

"We cannot reach the flow of things unless we let go."




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