Re: Request for comments: project proposal

On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 03:28:42PM -0600, Robert P. Goldman wrote:
>     Ng>   http://www.divmod.org/Home/Projects/Quotient/
>     Ng>   http://www.osafoundation.org/OSAF_Our_Vision.htm
> 
> I wouldn't be in a hurry to agree with that.  Looking at the OSAF
> thing, anyway, it seems almost certain that it is going to share
> misfeatures with Mozilla from Robert's (and my) POV:

I dunno, I've only seen their vision, not their code. ;-)

> "Alternatives such as Mozilla are, of course, even worse (no spell
> checker, no usual Emacs commands, ...)"
> 
> I dunno about no spell checker, but the lack of integration with my
> editor environment makes all these things (Mozilla, evolution, kmail)
> non-starters in my book.  
> 
>     Ng> The keyword is 'platform', the construction of which,
>     Ng> (perceived) lack of libraries notwithstanding, CL is very good
>     Ng> at.
> 
> Where did that keyword come from?

Emacs is a platform. Emacs can talk to the outside world, e.g., via ILISP
or SLIME to CL processes, via comint to various interpreters, via FTP (and
perhaps WebDAV) to web content management platforms like Zope, etc.

Quoting the OSAF page:

  Chandler isn't limited to the features that OSAF provides. Besides being
  a powerful application, it's also an extensible platform that can be both
  employed and further extended by programmers and end-users in many
  different ways.

Okay, the above page goes on to say that Chandler can be extended by
writing Python with the wxPython GUI toolkit, so their platform vision isn't
general enough.

A properly constructed platform will neither mandate a monster GUI nor a
light-weight GUI toolkit nor being browser-driven only nor preclude
building an emacs interface to it.

Cheers.

-- 
Ng Pheng Siong <[email protected]> 

http://firewall.rulemaker.net -+- Firewall Change Management & Version Control
http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- Open Source Python Crypto & SSL