Hi all, Before I get to my questions I think i should tell you a bit about myself and let you know what I get personally from this API. To me, playing around with this project is a hobby, something I tinker with in my spare time just for personal knowledge. I have no formal web design or programming training, like a lot of people out there and maybe like some of the other more silent members on the list I started out with Notepad creating simple web pages for friends - discovered the wonders of javascript, css etc, DynAPI 1 and maybe 18 months or so ago I found DynAPI 2 and became hooked. I'm mostly a lurker who reads the various posts etc and then tries out some of the ideas discussed on my own personal copy for fun- I enjoy feeling a part of all this even though I don't take an active roll in it...
Now maybe as just a hobbyist I'm "sticking my nose in" so to speak, but I'll go ahead and say what I want to say and hope I don't annoy anyone :) With Dan's announcement that his gui widgets will be released as a kind of 'retail pack' Does that mean that none of the improvements/enhancements whatever can filter back into the current code and still keep within the license? Also the comment Dan made about nobody contributing widgets back into the project is a little unfair I feel. In the eighteen months that I've been following things, no new widgets have been added to the distribution - but I think that is because nobody has bothered packaging the newer stuff up - it usually just goes to Richards site and becomes reference material. And yet some of those widgets are to my mind superior to the 'standard' versions in many ways. I don't know, perhaps nobody has actually come out and said "I think my widget is better/smaller/more efficient than core widget X, so would you consider it as a replacement" Or perhaps most of the developers are more interested in what happens in the event system/dynlayer.js etc to be interested in adding new or impoved gui/anim/util components? Another thing that has been mentioned is the fact that everyone recreates the gui widgets to suit there own 'style' or current project or whatever. So what are all the extra components in the distribution for? They get all the attention - bug fixes posted to the lists - tests on the compatibility matrix , updated for each new release etc. They will probably even get documented or have tutorials written for them soon... but why? They are in effect just window dressing aren't they? Nobody in their right mind would consider building a relatively complex interface that uses button.js or list.js etc it would be huge! Would it not be more useful to break off the core API as it is now into a seperate zip file? ie release the core components (api & events) as one zip file - perhaps the animation stuff as another and then the gui components as yet another? That way the people that want to concentrate on the core (Jordi etc) will carry on with what they do best, releasing an updated engine - and it leaves things open for some of us to 'give back' by way of gui components etc. As things are now I think most of the regulars download a 130k zipfile and then throw about 90k away. The DynAPI homepage could become a repository for all kinds of different extensions to the core - you could go and download the latest dynapi.zip and then choose danwidgets.zip or tinywidgets.zip, or whatever suits what your working on and they would all benefit from being enhanced/supported as part of the over all DynAPI. Finding a way of developing a leaner/more customisable set of widgets is something that really interests me, same goes for the animation code - but as things stand at the moment I don't feel confident that anything I could contribute would actually ever make it into part of the project. We have the same old widgets we have always had and that seems to be the way of things. Sure I could go ahead and release some code on a corner of the web someplace, maybe even do the same as Michael Pemberton or Pascal and make another distro -but as I said, I'm a hobbyist and don't have the benefit of browser X and OS Y to test everything on, so anything I released outside the project would probably just 'fall by the wayside' so to speak. There seems to be a plan/design for the core elements but everything else seems to be tacked on to that. Would anyone be interested in working with me in actually laying down a draft or plan of what could become a replacement for some of those components? I suspect that most of you out there think 'I can improve that' about some of the code - why don't we tackle it properly with a coherent design plan so that people can actually download and use some gui widgets 'out of the box' instead of reinventing the wheel so much. Sorry for the length of the post - I got carried away. :) _______________________________________________ Dynapi-Dev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mail-archive.com/dynapi-dev@lists.sourceforge.net/
