Re: Scaffold API proposal 0.2

Hey Gustavo,

I would just like to say great work.  I'm still looking over it all and
digesting it.  Once we have solid interfaces I would be glad to code
some of them.  

I would like to consider using the at least a subset of the XPath API
for the ValueContainer stuff.  Why?  because it is very simple and well
defined.  Basicly if we had a tree:

/Documents
	/Document name = "hello.c" mimetype="text/x-c"
	/Document name = "hello.h" mimetype="text/x-c-header"
	/Document name = "world.c" mimetype="text/x-c"
	/Document name = "world.h" mimetype="text/x-c-header"

/Documents/*  would return a list of all children of Documents (In this
case a list of all Document objects)
/Documents/Document would return a list of all Document objects
/Documents/Document[1] would return the first document "hello.c"
/Documents/Document[last()] would return the last document "world.h"
/Documents/Document[@name] would return all Document objects with a name
/Documents/Document[@name="hello.h"] would return the hello.h Document

This would give us the ability in the future to integrate into open
standards more redily.  It also takes the pressure off defining an API
as we can now consentrate on defining what subset we would use.  I can
remeber using a program written in VB.  The one cool asspect of it was
that the main interface was written in HTML and used XPath or some MS
knockoff, to trigger events within the ActiveX controls.  So a link that
was clicked would have /app/main/action[10] as its target.  Inorder to
customize the interface for my company all I had to do was figure out
what action path did what and write a link.  Scaffold might not use this
but some other app using scaffold technology might.  

XPath is already integrated into libxml2 so we could somehow use that
(keep an XML rep of our paths in memory which should never get more than
a couple of hundred nodes if even), rip their code, or implement our own
mini-XPath API.

Just a thought.

--
J5

On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 19:16, Gustavo Giráldez wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> Here's a new version of my API proposal for Scaffold with changes due to
> the feedback I got from you.  Attached is the html version.  You can get
> the Docbook file from
> http://webs.uolsinectis.com.ar/gustavog1/scaffold/.
> 
> There are still a bunch of missing/incorrect parts.  Most notably, the
> ideas from John's last mail[1]: the layout switch, highlighting and the
> markers interface.  Those are particularly hard and I haven't had much
> time to think about them.
> 
> I think I'll start throwing out some code, so I'd like to get the basic
> interfaces first (ValueContainer, EventBus, ShellUI and UIActionTarget).
> 
> Also, I want to have a document describing the expected implementation
> and behavior of the fundamental plugins (namely project manager,
> document manager and session).  I'll write a draft document in the next
> few days (unless somebody else wants to do it ;-)
> 
> Comments, ideas, flames? :-)  All feedback appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> Gustavo
> 
> 
> [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devtools/2004-January/msg00031.html
> 
>