Re: [Fresco-devel] A Graphic Dictionary

First part of my reply: This is about the dictionary as it is now, IMHO fit 
for a scenegraph debugging tool it was intended for.

On Monday 06 January 2003 02:03, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
> Tobias Hunger wrote:
> > Downside: As this Dictionary is not exported via CORBA this dictionary is
> > not accessible for remote Graphics and cannot get queried by
> > applications. It is purely server internal.
>
> I don't think that this is a drawback at all. We are talking about a
> debugging tool, right ?

It does not allow to get any information on client side graphics. Since that 
is used to prototype and prototypes tend to be buggy I do consider this to be 
a bit of a problem. It's not a huge problem as those prototype will usually 
use other graphics made by Kits (which will be registered with the 
dictionary). Since you further use not that many prototypes in one 
application anyway it should be fairly easy to figure out which of those 
'unknown' graphics belongs where.

Being server internal further mandates that the scenegraph debugger is build 
into the server. Nicholas' approach of a client doing that won't work (or at 
least won't get to the information stored in the dictionary.

<snip>

> > What do you think about such a Dictionary? Is that a good thing to have?
>
> As I said, I'd suggest you start outlining what exactly you want this to
> help you with, i.e. some use cases would help to see where such graphic
> names would help.

What the dictionary can be used for now if this:
    a) give a name/description to a graphic
    b) figure out where it came from

a) is mandatory to be able to make any sense out of a dump of the scenegraph 
in whatever form. b) is just nice to have IMHO, some kind of backtrace for 
Graphics.

I might want to add
    c) get access to the implementation
later. That could be nice, but we'd need some more elaborate tool then a 
simple 'scenegraph dumper' I'm aiming for right now to make use of that.

> > I was wondering wether such a dictionary can be used to help with the
> > switching of Kits at runtime.
>
> Ouch.

Hey! That's exactly the reaction I thought I'd get;-)

Answer to the 'other half' about switching of kits at runtime in a separete 
mail.

-- 
Gruss,
Tobias

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Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or better'
[email protected]                      So I installed Linux.
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