Re: [NextGenPE-devel] Plans etc..

[NextGen P. E. m. l. <nex...@li...>]

gRRosminet wrote:

> I have looked for useful components (specily for text 
> editing) and found wxScintilla... The major problem with such a 
>  component is that it is only available for  windows and GTK...

Another reason for writing an editor oneself is that even scintilla does
not have some features one might want - adding them to an editor you
write yourself may be easier.  wxWidgets 2.8.0 now has a wxRichTextCtrl
which looks good - better than the old wxTextCtrl.  When it was just
wxTextCtrl, I found for an assembler I was writing that I needed to roll
my own editor window based on wxScrolledWindow.  Scintilla didn't do
what I wanted and would have brought in more code than I wanted to.
wxTextCtrl had too serious limitations, most notably on control of
scrolling - though I did try using it at first.

> ...as you might know, DDE is a 
> proprietary technology from Microsoft and then requires to be adapted in 
> an other way to run on Linux/Unix ... this is double work

Good point.  There is also wxTCPClient as an alternative to wxDDEClient,
and that is cross platform, but that then has a disadvantage that XPE
would pop up a security alert the first time it is run under WindowsXP
(because of default WindowsXP firewall settings).

wxWidgets is missing a communications class that will wrapped a named
pipe nicely.  When I'm next at the wxWiki I may suggest it.

> If you take a look at XPE source code, you'll see that options dialog is 
> using my global framework and then is quite efficient on reducing 
> repetitive code. 

Well...  I have looked there now, and the code is more repetitive than
it needs to be, but absolutely fine for the number of config variables
that you have AT THE MOMENT.  It only really makes sense to go to the
lengths Audacity does to reduce the repetition when there are a much
larger number of parameters.  Yes.  At the moment introducing ShuttleGui
would be overkill.  It would add more code than you save.  Anyway it's
possible to retrofit it at a later stage.  That's what happened to
Audacity when the config classes got too large and unmanageable.

Are you open to other developers contributing to XPE, and if so, what
aspect would you most like them to look at?

--James.