Re: bindings and Renaissance

[Gregory John Casamento]

One thing I feel compelled to mention...

Gorm is now "angostic" about the format it reads and saves.   The 
reader/builder classes are what handle transformation to and from the internal 
data structures.

Also, Gorm's editors allow editing of any kind of object (auto layout enabled 
or not). 

One of the features I'm going to add to Gorm soon is the ability to have 
"plugins" that will allow you to extend Gorm's capabilities without adding a 
palette.  This will make it easier to add a reader/builder for Renaissance (or 
any other format you fancy).

My dream for Gorm is to make it a "universal" GUI builder that can be adapted 
to almost anything.

Later, GJC
 
Gregory Casamento -- Principal Consultant - OLC, Inc 
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer

----- Original Message ----
From: Nicola Pero <address@hidden>
To: Gregory John Casamento <address@hidden>
Cc: Xavier Glattard <address@hidden>; Fred Kiefer <address@hidden>; 
address@hidden
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 6:04:13 AM
Subject: Re: bindings and Renaissance


> Aren't you effectively writing code when you create the XML by hand?

Good question.

The Renaissance XML format was designed to be "a pleasure" to edit by hand;
I personally like to edit the Renaissance XML files in emacs and find it 
very productive - very simple, short, logical, to the point, quick to edit, 
with all and only the relevant information displayed. :-)

But I completely understand people who use Gorm which is a fantastic tool 
if you like visual editing.  It's a different approach.

The ideal scenario was to have a Renaissance/Gorm GUI builder (as we have 
discussed countless times, this would allow a lot of different approaches
from an integrated app), but I have come to the realization that I'm not
alone and there are other developers who actually like to edit the Renaissance 
XML files in their editor too!  In fact the most exciting/excited users don't 
seem to care that much about the GUI builder.  So I'm ignoring the GUI builder 
issue, and aiming for a stable, robust and complete Renaissance 1.0 release 
which will be complete but won't have a GUI builder.  We'll work on the 
Gorm/Renaissance integration later, for Renaissance 2.0. :-)

Btw, having different tools to build GUIs is great as it gives people a choice. 
 
Different tasks/developers are more or less suited to different tools.  
So it enriches GNUstep as a project to have various options available. :-)

Also, we have two ways of attracting Apple developers to GNUstep / GNU;
Gorm provides them with a free tool similar to the Apple one (attracting
developers looking for something similar to Interface Builder); Renaissance 
provides them with something new/different (attracting developers looking 
for something different from Interface Builder).

Thanks