>Yeah. I think im with this. In fact i think all components on the card
>should be
>"pluged in"Create support for plugins as one of the first things to do
>then just
>write some button plugins to come with the program. This would really
>attract the
>attention of programers and authorers and if we cant support classes then this
>would be the next best thing.
>I would suggest activeX but i find it buggy and we need it to be truely cross
>platform.
>Let them be made in the same way that XCMDs are made. In no time free ones
>would
>pop up all over malinglists and the web.
Julian,
basically this is a good thought. But since we're talking C++ (that is,
object-oriented) programming here, and we're Open Source, I think we should
do this using a C++ class. Something like the "traits" classes in ANSI's
C++ lib. That is, we'd have a class for each button style that is created
by the button object when the style is changed, and that class does
drawing, hit-testing etc.
The problem with plug-ins is that some platforms do not support executable
code anywhere except in the application itself or a DLL (=shared library).
This means we'd have a separate file for each plug-in style at worst, sort
of like it was in OMO. Also, the plug-ins would need to be re-compiled for
each platform, which I'm sure half of the people writing plug-ins wouldn't
do (they'd just release the version for the OS they developed for without
the sources).
So, I think we should make it easy to add new styles by simply registering
a new class with OpenCard, and we could later create a "joker" style that
fetches custom styles from a DLL, but I'd postpone that until we have
OpenCard 1 (the 100%-HyperCard thing) finished.
ActiveX is not an option. It's proprietary and only works on Windows, the
Mac version is (as far as I heard) buggy and has only a tiny amount of the
functionality the Windows version has, and *nix/Linux is completely without
it.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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