Re: [Gnome-devtools] What we're doing.

[Mark <jamess1 wwnet com>]

Andrew Sutton wrote:
> 
> what i'm trying to get at is an environment that hides the process. a
> short example.
> 
> i want to write an application for mathematical modelling (god knows why
> - i'm not that good at math). for some ungodly reason, i have all the
> capabilities and requirements in my head, but decide to put down a class
> diagram in our envisioned ide's design tools. the ide would recognize
> that i am participating in that phase of the design process and present
> me with options to do more design oriented tasks (like design doc
> generation). i might not need them, i just want to go write the code.
> the ide recognizes the participation there and presents me with options
> for coding (editor, builder, etc.).

I would consider myself a hacker (as I do this for fun), but I
definently see an advantage to design tools. I use them myself to a
certain extent, like the UML templates in Dia. I'm not sure how well
dialog-style interaction would go over with "hacker" types though, you
would have to test that out. I think something that might interest you
is that I'm working on the document parsing component of our development
framework. Theorectically whith gpf it should be fairly easy to go from
UML -> code and code -> UML, provided there is a proper mapping in the
language. This would allow for a lot of self documentation (api docs,
ect), and also allow for syncranization of the code and the
documentation. So it should be very possible within our framework, to go
back and forth between high level design tools and actual code, while
self documenting. This would be very nice indeed, but right now I'm
still working on the key framework component for this, gpf.

Mark