Hey Leif,
thanks for the effort and time you put in this project.
You know from my recent post that I would make a good use of DynAPI2 working
with latest browsers, but...
From what i read, my suggestion is get 3 up and running and have a good
documentation and possibly manual written. If the developers have a sound
documentation on 3 it would make much more sense to work with 3 that going
back to 2 or even 1, wouldn't it.
cheers,
Jirka
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leif W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <dynapi-dev@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:31 PM
Subject: [Dynapi-Dev] DynAPI 1 & 2?
Hmm, I'm skimming through the recently pinged bug reports and noticed a
DynAPI 2 question raised by Doug, "Are we patching DynAPI 2 for
distribution?" (paraphrase).
Short answer is no. Why? Because we have a lot of work to do on DynAPI 3
still.
Long answer? I think it would be great to consider this for a moment.
This is just pure speculation at this point.
Should we continue to upgrade DynAPI 2 and DynAPI 1 for that matter, to
run in the most recent browsers? I wonder about the feasibility of this
at the moment and in the future. Shall we endeavour to maintain three
targets as opposed to one, when it's all we can do to work on the most
recent one? It's not feasible at present with the number of volunteer
hours we have. There have been some other parties who have done a bit of
this work on their own, notably getting DynAPI to run in Gecko engines.
But integrating and testing everything, that's a trick.
Am I personally opposed to this? No. In the back of my mind I think it
would be nice to bring the older versions up to dat, if at all possible.
But, there's so many different browsers, and during each AI incarnation,
different browsers and version reigned. It would all have to be recoded
to split up arch as needed, to avoid dumping it all into single large
files with a bunch of if/else conditionals. That would be a nightmare.
In any event, the pipe dream would be to have a drop-in replacement, so
nothing has to be done to old code. Hmm, well, yeah, impossible, but
let's play "what if?". What if we had some translation layer on top of
the newest API, so you could optionally bridge the gap between the two
namespaces (current and whatever the old was). Likewise, a nightmare for
maintenance, probably sluggish for performance. But hey, computers are a
lot faster now, right?
Hmm, yeah, so then there's also the idea, what if we could provide a
conversion tool. Let the end-developer run this tool on their DynAPI 1 or
DynAPI 2 code, and convert it to a DynAPI 3 target. Nice, but probably
quite difficult to achieve, when you consider the amalgamation of widgets
that were never ported or dupliated across all DynAPI revisions. Then you
also have to consider that people may prefer DynAPI 1 or DynAPI 2, so a
conversion or translation layer should be able to go back and forth any
DynAPI version.
So, we come to the final two ideas for ways to handle this.
First, we make a push to port all DynAPI 1 and DynAPI 2 widgets to DynAPI
3 platform and techniques. During this process we make note of the steps
involved.
Second, we update the documentation based on the notes, so an
end-developer can understand how to go back and forth. This provides the
groundwork for some of the previously mentioned ideas.
These are probably the most realistic things that could be achieved, but
are still by no means feasible at present. If we get to the point where
DynAPI 3 satisfies most people, then maybe we can put new features on hold
and revisit the ideas to recycle some old code.
Ideas? Opinions?
Leif
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