I've been programming in many languages for a long time; however, I've
not had a chance to do "Visual programming". I've been reading about
it and learning what the term is really all about. From my understanding,
some of the strengths of such an environment is:
* Visual construction of user interface
* Browser-based construction of functions and/or variables
* easy "plug-in" components with some type of "visual" configuration
in the environment's GUI. These components could do anything
and isn't required to be a "visual" part of the program
resulting program.
It's this last one that I'm not seeing in Visual Tcl. Is there any
desire for this? For me, I'd like to use the Balloon stuff from vtcl
itself. I've looked at it and it's not really a module yet so some
effort is needed to get it working in a different app. Also when
new widget sets are supported; this "plug-in" idea could really pay
off with others writing the GUI development part and vtcl just
treating them as it's own widget handling code. [with the right
interpreter running vtcl]
Any ideas of how to get this functionallity?
I think these are some the areas where some sort of design is needed:
* Adding new widgets to toolbar (or panel)
* generic initialization code startup
* Adding menu items or submenus to development GUI for new
"sub-system" additions. (Like a help editor :)
For the generic init code, something like this might do the trick:
#
# All "auto-initialization" code should start with: vtclModule_init_
# Exmaple: vtclModule_init_balloonhelp
#
proc plugin_init {} {
set list [info commands vtclModule_init_]
# for auto-loading stuff.
if [info exists vtcl_dynamic_inits] {
lappend list $tcl_dynmaic_inits)
}
foreach i $list {
$i
rename $i ""
}
}
plugin_init; rename plugin_init ""
The GUI "patching" (adding) features, I think, would require a registry
of components (maybe the generic init code could help here).
Comments?
Thanks,
Dan
--
Dan Miner [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The longer I stare at this screen; the blanker it gets."
Linux: try it, you'll like.
"Your program is encoded in pi." I started with a 64
