[Embedlets-dev] [wiring] Wiring tool inspiration program

[Ted K. <tk...@ya...>]

There was an ice storm here in Southern Ohio and we have been without power for
two days.  I was able to figure out a way to access the net for a half hour or
so but I will not be online again until the power comes on.

In the mean time, one of the developers that Bruce found on the Lego list
has turn out to be a fabulous resource.  His name is Peter Balch and he is
somewhat of an expert in graphical programming languages.

He sent me a copy of a research program he had developed awhile back and after
looking at it I think that it has some good ideas that can possibly be used in
the Embedlets wiring tool.

Here is a link to the program in case anyone wants to take a look at it:

http://tkosan.javadevices.org/misc/embeddedjava/Filter.zip


Unfortunately Peter says that he could not find all of the DLLs for the program
so it is not completely functional but the graphical editor works fine and this
is what we are mostly interested in anyway.

Peter has been passing along to me a number of pitfalls he ran into when
developing this and other graphical research languages and so hopefully this
information will prove to be helpful to us.

As an example of this, Peter indicated that placing the graphical components on
a grid turned out to be much cleaner than just wiring them free form.  I think
that we will probably include a number of ways to views wired Embedlets
including a grid view and also free-form view but I had not thought about the
grid view until Peter mentioned it.

Anyway, the components that Peter included with Filter are not necessarily good
candidates for Embedlets but the way that they are connected together looks
interesting.  I recommend first opening up some of the pre-wired applications
that are included with Filter before trying to wire together any from scratch.


Ted

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