Here's a gui app builder

[Paul E Johnson]

Hey, everybody.

I believe Marcus will have seen programs like this before, but others in
our community (people like me) have not. SO take a look at this thing I
saw in FreshMeat today:

WideStudio
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~uj3s-hrby/EE/index.html

I just downloaded this and ran it. It raised my interest about gui
program builders and Swarm.  It made me think it is feasible to have a
gui swarm builder, which I had doubted in the past, honestly.  (I just
ran the Linux version, not the MS Windows package.  The Windows package
has some conceptual similarities with the Swarm distribution, in that he
is providing users with gcc and some other Unix tools in the Windows
format).

Originally, I had not realized this was a part of the long term vision
for Swarm, but it has been all along, (Chris Langton told me so 2 weeks
ago). Through the years, and various approaches have been considered. 
Back before I knew what "beans" was, there were people at Swarmfest
talking about beans.

Concerning WideStudio, I am not proposing it for Swarm, but I do think
it is interesting because it is a self contained, multi platform gui
builder, and if I had a way to tell it about swarm classes, then I could
build a gui swarm program.  I don't understand enough of what's under
the hood here to see what that would require, but maybe some of you
programmer types will.  Using this does not require any separate layer,
COM, etc, which I think is a little comforting.  If Swarm classes could
"reflect" their variables and methods out to a gui like WideStudio, it
could be really fun.

If you download it, maybe you will see what I mean.

Maybe I have to learn c++ and translate some base Swarm libraries into
that format in order to talk to a program like this.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700


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