M. Uli Kusterer wrote:
At 14:05 Uhr +0100 24.04.2005, David Chisnall wrote:
Perhaps we could provide a lightweight scripting language, with a UI
like Automator (or, at least, how I assume Automator works - I haven't
actually used it) for combining components, perhaps built on
StepTalk? `Applications' would be sets of components, perhaps
including some fairly specialised ones that probably won't be used
elsewhere, combined using a simple script.
This may be a neat feature, but I think it's an entirely separate
project from the main desktop. AFAIK, Automator currently consists of an
API specification that lets you create a simple GUI for each task
component an application wants to expose, which it can then display.
Most of this is done via AppleScript and AppleEvents. GNUstep could
probably do similarly using DO and StepTalk.
Remember, there already are a number of GNUstep applications that use
the traditional style. The easier we make it for them to add Etoile
features to their apps without having to rewrite them from the ground
up, the more likely it is they'll do so. Same goes for future ports of
Cocoa applications. If we require StepTalk to build a GUI app from
components, people are locked into GNUstep and StepTalk. But if it's
just a feature of a GNUstep application, you can choose the language
that fits your task. Java, ObjC, StepTalk, Python? No problem.
Uli, I think there's a misunderstanding here...StepTalk is not a
language, nor is the StepTalk framework only limited to supporting
Smalltalk. StepTalk can work with many different scripting languages,
such as Ruby and others, it's just that nobody has ever written a
language bundle to support that. StepTalk, itself, however, is designed
in a modular way so as to intentionally facilitate the support of other
languages.
Just wanted to clear that up, because it seems like you may not have
realized this.
