Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: music widgets
From: David Slomin (dgslomin_AT_CS.Princeton.EDU)
Date: ma syys 27 1999 - 13:55:26 EDT
On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, rob wrote:
> i think that it would be interesting to have pluggable editors.
> editing and composition styles create strong likes and dislikes of certain
> interfaces, but there is no objective way to judge a particular widget as
> the *best*. so the easiest way to work with this, is to let the user have
> a set of choices that they could easily use, and which needn't force them
> to choose a program on the basis of a certain feature.
I rather like that idea, because it extends the small, focussed, reusable,
and replacable tool design of Unix-style command line tools to the GUI
construction domain. Think of the host app as a command shell and the
widgets as command-line programs.
My only objection is just how are you going to plug them in? How do I
plug a staff widget written using GTK into a host app written using Qt? In
my analogy to shell programming, you have stdin, stdout, environment
variables, and files as standardized methods of communication between the
"plugins". Just about the only means of communication I can think of
that's standard across toolkits for widgets is the X clipboard, and even
that's a little shaky.
> additionally scripting langauges....like lisp or scheme (guile) or
> tcl can create a sort of emacs for music.
I personally prefer the bottom-up approach (common widgets which can be
reused in different host apps) to the top-down approach (a single host app
which is customizable through heavy scripting support), but both are very
valid and useful. Keep in mind, the top-down approach has been tried many
times in music apps (I can think of examples for each of the languages you
mentioned), and has not necessarily proven to be a solution to all life's
problems.
So I prefer the bottom-up approach in general, and the
language/platform/toolkit (Java) of the host app I'm currently writing
(Songpad) has strong support for reusable widgets (Beans). However, I'm
still probably going to end up using the top-down approach because it is
excruciatingly difficult to design a complex widget to be flexible enough
for reuse. Designing cripting hooks to be sufficiently flexible is also
difficult, but not quite as bad, it seems to me.
Div.
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