Re: high level application frameworkl

[Dirk Koopman <djk tobit co uk>]

On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 09:37 +1000, Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Dirk Koopman wrote:
>
> > For many years (about 26) I have used an "application framework" of my
> > own devising (in various incarnations) for separating "business
> > logic" [ugh] and data manipulation, completely, from visual
> > representation on "curses" based terminals. 
> >
> > It allows programmers to say things like: take these data fields
>
> Gtk2::Ex::DBI ... links to ...

Who says there is any SQL (or ISAM or files) involved?

> >  and
> > display them according to form xxx;
>
> Gtk2::GladeXML

Which would be fine...

> >  then tell me if these values are
> > entered or those keys are pressed;
>
> Either connect to the 'changed' signal of each widget and do things
> while the user is inputting data, or pull all the values at once when
> the data entry is complete and the user hits 'apply'. With Gtk2::Ex::DBI
> you can do all this by defining a 'before_apply' callback which is run
> before the record is applied.

And at this point it all goes pear shaped, because we are thinking the
wrong way up. Also I want fine grained control *during* the form and I
don't wish to get into the minutia of gtk style callbacks (under the
hood things will be calling back like billy-ho) but for the programmer
this must all be seamless (and very, very easy). 

The programmer thinks in terms of the field (or data if you will); he
isn't interested, nor does he know, that it will indeed be implemented
with the sort of callback you describe. The Gtk part is the widget set
that *implements* the data model and programming abstraction that I am
trying to describe.

As an aside, once I have done it, it might well be that (if anybody
could actually be bothered) it could be reshimmed into another widget
set (eg M$ Windows API) and the programmer would not notice.

Anyway, please carry on trying to educate me, because I might be wrong
and may be missing something vital - I am a Gtk newbie afterall -
although I have been programming for a while... 

Dirk