Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] fixed build error in trunk

[Joe E. <jo...@em...>]

On 8/31/2011 4:14 PM, Michael Hawkins wrote:
> I ran into some rather tough jsynthlib admin's a couple of years back. I think it was you Bill!

I don't think Bill is an "admin" (in the sense that he can't authorize 
people to upload to the svn repository); I think only Joachim and Brian 
are. The rest of us (about 15 others) have write-access to the svn, but 
we can't add people.

> The only thing that drives me nuts about jsynthlib is the maddening process of laying out widgets. There simply has to be either better documentation on it or a better way of doing it. But maybe I just still don't know what I am doing!

About 4 years ago, I started on a massive (for me) re-factoring of the 
code. I moved everything into packages which compartmentalized what 
everything did (ie, a package for low-level MIDI message handling, a 
package for the main GUI, a package for the widgets, etc.). The two big 
hurdles were:
1 - Rewriting the low-level MIDI stuff. As I recall, sending and polling 
for MIDI signals was done with the GUI thread or something, so I made a 
new thread which would handle all queuing of MIDI messages and notify 
various sysex handlers that something had come in for them, etc. It made 
it so that I could write a little MIDI monitor window to watch incoming 
traffic, etc.
2 - Re-vamping the hierarchy of the JSynthlib widgets. It turns out that 
the basic JSynthlib window was named something strange, which made it 
hard to get up to speed on how to make a new synth-lib module.

Anyway, as you can imagine, with a huge refactor like that, there were 
tons of compile errors as I changed around the way things were invoked, 
etc. When I ran out of steam on it, I think there were still a handful 
of errors that I couldn't really figure out how to best solve... so I 
never committed the changes.

Since the project is so dormant, I'm tempted to dig the code up again 
and commit it just to see if it generates some renewed interest...

- Joe