Re: [Dynapi-Dev] DynAPI 1 & 2?

[<jir...@co...>]

Hey Leif,

thanks for the effort and time you put in this project.
You know from my recent post that I would make a good use of DynAPI2 working 
with latest browsers, but...

From what i read, my suggestion is get 3 up and running and have a good 
documentation and possibly manual written. If the developers have a sound 
documentation on 3 it would make much more sense to work with 3 that going 
back to 2 or even 1, wouldn't it.

cheers,
Jirka




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Leif W" <war...@us...>
To: <dyn...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, August 03, 2005 2:31 PM
Subject: [Dynapi-Dev] DynAPI 1 & 2?


> Hmm, I'm skimming through the recently pinged bug reports and noticed a 
> DynAPI 2 question raised by Doug, "Are we patching DynAPI 2 for 
> distribution?" (paraphrase).
>
> Short answer is no.  Why?  Because we have a lot of work to do on DynAPI 3 
> still.
>
> Long answer?  I think it would be great to consider this for a moment. 
> This is just pure speculation at this point.
>
> Should we continue to upgrade DynAPI 2 and DynAPI 1 for that matter, to 
> run in the most recent browsers?  I wonder about the feasibility of this 
> at the moment and in the future.  Shall we endeavour to maintain three 
> targets as opposed to one, when it's all we can do to work on the most 
> recent one?  It's not feasible at present with the number of volunteer 
> hours we have.  There have been some other parties who have done a bit of 
> this work on their own, notably getting DynAPI to run in Gecko engines. 
> But integrating and testing everything, that's a trick.
>
> Am I personally opposed to this?  No.  In the back of my mind I think it 
> would be nice to bring the older versions up to dat, if at all possible. 
> But, there's so many different browsers, and during each AI incarnation, 
> different browsers and version reigned.  It would all have to be recoded 
> to split up arch as needed, to avoid dumping it all into single large 
> files with a bunch of if/else conditionals.  That would be a nightmare.
>
> In any event, the pipe dream would be to have a drop-in replacement, so 
> nothing has to be done to old code.  Hmm, well, yeah, impossible, but 
> let's play "what if?".  What if we had some translation layer on top of 
> the newest API, so you could optionally bridge the gap between the two 
> namespaces (current and whatever the old was).  Likewise, a nightmare for 
> maintenance, probably sluggish for performance.  But hey, computers are a 
> lot faster now, right?
>
> Hmm, yeah, so then there's also the idea, what if we could provide a 
> conversion tool.  Let the end-developer run this tool on their DynAPI 1 or 
> DynAPI 2 code, and convert it to a DynAPI 3 target.  Nice, but probably 
> quite difficult to achieve, when you consider the amalgamation of widgets 
> that were never ported or dupliated across all DynAPI revisions.  Then you 
> also have to consider that people may prefer DynAPI 1 or DynAPI 2, so a 
> conversion or translation layer should be able to go back and forth any 
> DynAPI version.
>
> So, we come to the final two ideas for ways to handle this.
>
> First, we make a push to port all DynAPI 1 and DynAPI 2 widgets to DynAPI 
> 3 platform and techniques.  During this process we make note of the steps 
> involved.
>
> Second, we update the documentation based on the notes, so an 
> end-developer can understand how to go back and forth.  This provides the 
> groundwork for some of the previously mentioned ideas.
>
> These are probably the most realistic things that could be achieved, but 
> are still by no means feasible at present.  If we get to the point where 
> DynAPI 3 satisfies most people, then maybe we can put new features on hold 
> and revisit the ideas to recycle some old code.
>
> Ideas?  Opinions?
>
> Leif
>
>
>
>
>
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