Re: [Gnumed-devel] switchable layout managers

[Karsten Hilbert]

> The way mini-gnumed does it:
> the main screen is divided into a toprow (to area of screen),
Same here.

> a notebookarea  (left side of screen), an upper and lower
> toolarea (right side of screen, on top of each other.
Sounds like Ian space, no ?

> These areas are separated by resizable borders ("sashes"), the GUI remembers 
> the position of the sashes in it's configuration registry.
Same here.

> The plugin manager looks forregistry sections "plugins.notebook", 
> "plugins.toprow" etc.
Same here, different names.

> In the order plugins are listed in the configuration, they are stacked into 
> the corresponding area's sizers (in the case of the notebook, they are added 
> as notebook pages).
Same here.

> Plugins KNOW NOTHING about the program itself.
Same here.

> The only common denominator 
> they have is gmDispatcher through which they can register callback functions 
> for events,
This may be something we can borrow to better our module
handling. Ian had been going into this direction although, as
is often the case with first implementations, it "had to be"
scrapped (but he can do better I trust :-)

> and gmConnection through which they can get cached authenticated 
> backend connections.
Same here.

Plus they know how to get hold of business objects.

> It is irrelevant whether other modules have hooked up to 
> the dispatcher, and irrelevant whether connections already exist (or 
> authentication details already entered) - gmDispatcher and gmConnection take 
> care of this and KNOW NOTHING about the rest of the application or plugins.
Same here. No difference.

> Even the logging module is completely "black boxed"; all it does is receive 
> messages from the dispatcher and display/record them as configured.
That is one area where we haven't black boxed. It'd be a waste
of time rewriting that now, however. When the time has come to
rewrite that it'll use the python loggin module which has
improved considerably.

> If Richard's layout is implemented as single notebook page,
Been *there* before and people didn't like it. I can still not
fully explain why (I see the points but don't agree they are
insurmountable).

Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD  4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346