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000164_misckit-reques…aska.et.byu.edu_Wed Apr 6 12:41:57 1994.msg
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Date: Wed, 06 Apr 1994 16:27:43 +0000 (MSZ)
From: Juergen Zeller <zet@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de>
Subject: Comments on MiscAgent
To: misckit@byu.edu, kane@cs.purdue.edu
Cc: zet@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de
Message-Id: <9404061427.AA24559@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
Mailer: Elm [revision: 70.30]
Hi Christopher, hi miscdoc,
Christopher Kanes's imagination of a MiscAgent sounds interesting!
Let me revise his mail about a MiscAgent from two different points of
view:
i) seeing it as a perl-programmer
ii) looking on it as a member of a large and loosely connected
work group
i)
Why is perl so popular? I think it is because it manages many common
tasks as they should happen, knowing trivial/common conditions and avoid
that you have to write additional code for them.
(i.E. comparing nonexistent Strings is save, one needn't add something like
if (aString && bString) {
cmp= strcmp(aString, bString);
}
else {
cmp= 1;
}
what is hard to read, needs more typing, ...)
In some sense, MiscAgent would be like perl: Charles in Christopher's
scenario #1 was no NeXTSTEP/OOP/OOD wizard, but by using standard GUI-Objects
and a MiscAgent he get very fast promising results, letting him spend his time
to talk with users of his app to make _real_ improvements of it.
As Christopher pointed out, MiscAgent would provide a easy to learn framework
for any common Application.
ii)
I've worked on a project (X11,Motif,C++) that represents a full dynamic
User Interface Management System (something like IB but with GUI-objects
talking to each other in a script language).
One of the biggest problem (which is still unsolved, I think) is the "implicit
programming" of that program. Most objects are "smart", they trigger other
objects for some tasks, what leads to events sent to yet other objects, ....
Because nobody did ever a design of the _whole_ program and its objects, a
programmer didn't know what he has to add in his code and what will be
"automatically" done by super classes, glue objects etc. Because there where
many programmers, usually adding only a small portion to the program (my task
was to add a image processing object) the lack of a formalism leaded to some
very strange results and errors. Debugging was nearly impossible, and
performance went down due to repeated execution of some code (i.E. some
windows were drawn eight times instead of one time).
The MiscKit is also a distributed piece of software, it is developed all over
the world. A looking ahead design of the MiscAgent will nearly be impossible
due to the Kit's very nature.
A MiscAgent as a quite informal framework could lead to a problem like the one
stated above:
Nobody knows exactly what's happening and - even more important - the exact
point where it happens can hardly be found by a new or different developer.
What's the summary of i) and ii)?
o MiscAgent will be a good framework for the classes MiscInfo,
MiscInfoController, MiscOrderForm, MiscRegistration, etc. . Common to these
classes is their moderate abstract contents and the fact that nearly every
app will need them in a similar way.
o MiscAgent will be the wrong way for adding the Model/Controller/View paradigm
(a short description is 1504_Informal_OOD.rtfd, NXApp, Winter 1993) to the
MiscKit. This should be done by building on Mike Ferris MODocManager/
MODocController/MOController approach.
Es grv{t
Jvrgen Zeller
zet@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de