[Boa Constr] Boa: first impressions

[Carlos R. <cri...@ma...>]

Well, I've just downloaded a CVS snapshot of Boa (version 0.1.3, I think). I 
would like to contribute with my first impressions. Some personal info 
first... I have a *lot* of experience with Delphi (since the first betas, 
pre-1.0).

- Boa is really nice and well structured. But documentation is lacking; I 
could not access any help information. I assume some doc is already 
available, but I don't know how to download it from CVS.

- For people used to popular two-way RAD GUI tools (such as Delphi and VB), 
the 'commit'/'cancel' nature of the Frame Designer looks strange at first. 
[In Delphi, the source code is automatically updated when you drop a 
component on the designer view]. But it works nicely, and it does not 
seriously affect productivity - it's just a matter of adaptation.

- The Frame Designer has a few problems, though. Some components proved 
difficult to select once put onto the designer., specially static text boxes. 
I tried clicking the mouse on some locations, but could not select it. Moving 
an edit box (the one called 'wxTextBox') was also difficult, but I managed to 
make it.

- I could not select more than one component at a time. Is it a 'feature', or 
is it going to be fixed?

- Changing the structure of the form also proved to be a little bit difficult. 
For example, I would like to put some components that were designed into the 
form inside a panel (I forgot to add the panel first :-) I know how to 
convince Delphi to let me do just that; not only cut & paste works fine in 
Delphi for multiple component selection, you can easily edit the form 
description, which sometimes is better than the visual form designer for some 
changes.

- I took a look at the code generated by Boa. I guess that the code was 
intended for processing by Boa alone, but it would not hurt if the code was 
formatted a little bit better. Breaking the long lines would help a lot for 
us to read and understand what's going on.

- Probably, my main gripe is with the lack of online documentation for the 
wxWindows library. I have heard how good wxWindows is, but a better 
documentation is really needed. I sincerely don't know where to start, and 
please bear in mind that I'm no novice in this stuff.

- Last but not least, I could not debug my first app and I have no idea why. I 
just clicked on the 'debug app' button, the mouse cursor went clocking, and 
Boa just froze - no redraws, no response to any command. Had to kill -9 it.

- Back to the textual description of the form, as available in Delphi... and 
to the code generated by Boa. I think that it would be interesting to 
describe the components using a dictionary, and then feeding this dictionary 
to a initialization procedure that would create the window using the 
information. It would make reading/editing the properties of the visual 
components a little bit easier. Form creation could be slowed down a little 
bit though. I assume that this topic was already discussed on the list 
before, could someone give me a few pointers?

- Back to the wxWindows documentations issues: one of the main problems with 
GUI libraries is that it's not enough to know the library functions; one has 
to understand how things do fit together, how do they interact. I'll give one 
example.

I know that wxWindows has some layout classes. The application that I am 
designing now calls for relatively complex windows, with panels with grids 
and buttons to act on particular records shown on those grids. The basic 
point here is that the window has to be structured the right way. In Delphi, 
I developed my own way to make it work - I make extensive use of panels as 
containers for rows of buttons, pseudo-title-bars for sections of the form, 
etc. The question is, is this the correct technique for wxWindows? 


Many thanks for the dev guys for Boa - it's already in a pretty usable state, 
and it will help me to write my new Python app very, very quickly. 


Carlos Ribeiro
InfTec