Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Knobs / widget design
From: Steve Harris (S.W.Harris_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Jun 10 2004 - 09:49:57 EEST
On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 08:22:12 -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> >On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 07:18:57PM -0400, Dave Robillard wrote:
> >> I think at this point all we need is a mechanism for a host to say
> >> "plugin, show your GUI now". (Incidentally what DSSI does as far as I
> >> know, which isn't very much yet). No embedding, no standard widget set,
> >> no crazy event loop stuff. Let's (gasp!) actually do something that
> >> will get done. (Of course noone is stopping anyone from making an
> >> audio-app-gui-widget library, far from it)
> >
> >Yep. Exactly.
>
> There is chasm both broad and deep between
>
> "plugin, show your GUI now"
>
> and an actual implementation of such functionality.
Yeah osc.udp://localhost:2134/ui/show ;) I'm very much in favour of
simple, UNDERcomplicated solutions. If you make its easy to do almost
everything and possible to do hard things I think you get the best
protocol / API / design.
e.g. HTTPs decision to make the protocol stateless. Its great. Means that
sessioning is a complete pain in the arse, but 99% of people never have to
do HTTP sessioning. OTOH FTP has tons of state (anddd hence a very complex
API), even though most people never use it.
> Even on windows/macos, where the toolkit issues do not exist in the
> same way, its still the *host* that creates the top level GUI
> resources and integrates them into its own scheme for display
> management.
Its out of process. Sounds like torben wants to swallow the plugin UI,
thats kinda neat, didn't think anyone would bother, but we should take
that into account.
> steve knows all too well from the gmpi list just how thorny these
> issues are. "let's (gasp!) actually do something that will ge done"
> ... nice try there dave, but it just *isn't* simple.
Yeah, but most of the issues are political and educational, not
technological.
> The LADSPA XML DTD that was posted/edited/discussed here 2 years ago
> would do a lot of what people have described here. But its dead in the
> water because it can't do it all. There is no magic bullet here that
> does not involve putting a gun to people's head and saying "do things
> this way". Oh, and the gun doesn't exist.
It also would be a hell of a lot of work. A decent XForms + SVG
implementation would do a damn good job for plugin UIs too. But, its
just an insane ammount of work.
- Steve
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