Subject: Re: Scripting
From: Mike Meyer (mwm@mired.org)
Date: Sun Jun 25 2000 - 05:03:39 CDT
Ash writes:
> On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, you wrote:
> > Well, I'm volunteering to work on the CORBA version if the group
> Well, if we've got a volounteer, then why not? CORBA seems sensible enough, and
> does seem as though it would do quite a good job.
Two issues. First, I'm not sure I'm going to have time to keep up with
mail, much less do any actual work, for the next couple of weeks.
Second, and more important, is that a lot of the nice things we've
talked about - reconfiguring the GUI, attaching macros to mouse
events/buttons/menus/etc - are *not* things I am qualifed to do. They
aren't rightly part of "adding CORBA" at all.
The GUI maps user actions (mouse events, keystrokes, menu selections,
etc.) to internal actions of some kind. Adding CORBA just adds one new
internal action as far as the user is concerned: "Start this CORBA
client." To be able to reconfigure the GUI so that arbitrary actions
start arbitrary macros, you really need a GUI that lets you
reconfigure things so arbitrary user actions start arbitrary internal
actions - whether one of those actions is "Run this CORBA macro" or
not. GUIs aren't my thing at all (I'm happy editing ASCII text files
to config, thank you very much). Personally, I'd add a single "Macro"
menu, and a "Macro Menu Edit" dialog. If someone wants the
configurable GUI features, that needs to happen in the GUI code, which
I haven't even looked at to date.
One thing that having CORBA (or something similar) brings to the table
is that if you define those internal actions in terms of their CORBA
equivalents, then you really only have one internal action type: "Run
this corba script" (where for most things, the script amounts to a
single method invocation on an object determined by the GUI). For
instance, the close window menu entry would map to
"CurrentWindow.Close()".
As a final note, a good CORBA extension will allow a script to read
(and change) every item in the preferences settings. So the act of
"Saving Preferences" could mean overwrite ~/.AbiSuite/AbiWord.profile
with a script that uses the CORBA interface to set all the
preferences. When AbiWord starts, it uses the "execute a script"
mechanism to execute tha script.
But that's quite a ways off yet....
Thanx,
<mike
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