Re: [Hwgui-developers] HwGUI development

[Maurizio la C. <m.l...@gm...>]

Hi Alexander,
I fully agree with your opinions.
I stopped my hwgui development just because his growth made this lib less
elegant and effective than the original implementation.
I already wrote about this question many times, but honestly I never had
time and strength to limit the impressive blowing up of the changes and
control the accordance to the first plot.
Most of the changes, I repeat myself, was made having as principal target
the xdesigner needs and then the library enhancement.
So mine it's a great yes to redraw the hwgui framework optimizing it to a
more effective structure and usage also when, as I was doing, the developer
don't use the designer.
Thanks for your new interest and welcome back.
BR
Maurizio
Il giorno 13/dic/2012 10:47, "Alexander S.Kresin" <al...@be...>
ha scritto:

> Hi All,
>
>   for a long time I didn't follow the HwGUI development. For my projects
> I still use an old version, which is about 4 -5 years old. Sometimes,
> quite rarely, I did necessary changes and uploaded them here. I didn't
> use the renewed HwGUI from the SF repository because of a big number of
> changes, for which I hadn't time and energy to review and to check. From
> time to time I reviewed the new code partially and returned to my old
> version because I found there many things, which I don't like.
>
>   Recently I was asked to review the Designer, because it has serious
> problems. I've build it with a latest HwGUI code and Harbour 3.2 and
> really found some:
> 1) incorrect appearance of non-English characters in some places - this
> resolves very easy by setting appropriate codepage;
> 2) object inspector - the selected items remains coloured as selected al
> the time - I don't know why yet, probably this goes from HBrowse;
> 3) when I try to open my report forms, the designer simply hangs.
>
>   I plan to investigate this problems deeper, but before I need to deal
> with the current HwGUI code. As I wrote above, there are things, which I
> don't like and which prevent me to upgrade to the newest version. There
> is a lot of additions, I believe that they are useful and really makes
> HwGUI better. The problem is with structure.
>
>   From the beginning I tried to make HwGUI compact and fast. My code
> wasn't ideal ( now it is a bit better :), and I hope it will better in
> future - we all are learning till the end of the life ) and there was
> fragments which I don't like. But now, from the point of a class
> structure, the things became even worse. I believe, that classes,
> especially basic classes, which have many objects, should have minimum
> of variables and methods - only that, which are really necessary. When
> HCustomWindow has some redundant variables and methods, the HControl,
> which inherits from it, adds new redundant, the final, for example, most
> frequently encountered HStatic has a number of redundant stuff. We have
> a lot of HStatic, HEdit, etc. objects in a form, each of them contains a
> lot of rubbish, which makes their response time bigger, though they
> never use it.
>    Why the response time become bigger ? Each control gets a lot of
> Windows messages, each message is handled in HwGUI code to find
> appropriate method and execute it. The more methods and vars has the
> object, the more time is needed to find necessary one.
>    To be more concrete, I consider the following methods of
> HCustomWindow as redundant: ResetScrollbars(), SetupScrollbars(),
> RedefineScrollbars() - because they don't needed for most controls,
> which inherits from HCustomWindow; GetParentForm() - from my point, it
> is better to write as a function; Hcontrol: FontBold(), FontItalic(),
> FontUnderline() - I don't see any reson why they should be separate
> methods. These are only examples, just to clarify my point. There is
> more stuff which, in my opinion, should be cleared.
>   The second important thing is adding of new features to controls. Look
> at HBrowse or HEdit - they became so big that it is very difficult to
> review and understand their work. I believe that most of these new
> features are useful, but why we put them into the same class ? We
> absolutely forget about such thing as Inheritance ( the only good
> exception is the HButtonEx by Luiz - but, IMO, it should be placed in
> separate file ). I prefer to have simple control classes with basic
> features, which are demanded in most cases and inherited from them,
> maybe multiply, "ex" classes - for to keep basic set clean, fast and
> readable.
>
>   So, I suggest to rewrite some parts of HwGUI in accordance with these
> thoughts and I'd like to hear your opinions.
>
>   Regards, Alexander.
>
> P.S. Uff... I hate to write such a long texts, especially on English :)
>
>
>
>
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