Re: [Hwgui-developers] HwGUI development

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Hi
At no time changes were made to the targeted DESIGNER or IDE. All implementations were to give more strength and control to the developer.
All lines of code done so with the intention of further optimization and elegance.

Regards
Luis Fernando 

From: Maurizio la Cecilia 
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 8:55 AM
To: Alex Kresin 
Cc: Hwgui-developers 
Subject: Re: [Hwgui-developers] HwGUI development

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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