[q-lang-users] Databases and GUI in Q (was: Re: Bug?)

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Eddie Rucker wrote:
> You remember when we tested the speed of the bignum operations? Although
> I haven't tested it on more than two machines, it seems that Q is faster
> than mzscheme in the ODBC department as well. The ODBC module takes MANY
> less programming steps than SrPersist for mzscheme to retrieve a query
> too!

Nice to hear. :)

I think that we still need a function which returns the results of a
query as a stream instead of a list. That would make it possible to
handle big result sets in a lazy fashion while retaining the convenience
of a list-like representation. As both the ODBC and the SQLite
interfaces readily support fetching individual results of a query as
they become available, it should be fairly easy to implement that. (In
fact, it's probably just a matter of rewriting the existing list-based
functions with streams.) Any takers?

> I must admit that I dig the GUI stuff in mzscheme over Tk though :(

You mean the "PLT framework" stuff? Is that based on some existing
toolkit? Can you give some more details?

I know that Tk looks rather old-fashioned and Q's Tk interface requires
you to write icky Tcl code, but it's adequate for simple applications,
works almost everywhere and you can use vtcl as a GUI builder. As an
alternative, we also have a bridge to Gnome/GTK via Gnocl, together with
its own GUI builder written in Q, but that only appears to work on Un*x
systems right now and the canvas widget is buggy. It would also be
possible to directly wrap one of the popular toolkits using SWIG but so
far noone has volunteered for such a tedious job. ;-) So it might be a
good idea to work on something smaller and more functional in style.

In fact, Yann Orlarey recently suggested to me that it would be nice to
have an experimental, functional style GUI framework in Q which would
allow you to play with new UI concepts. That sounds like an interesting
research project. We could probably build this on some cross-platform
and cross-backend graphics library (Cairo?). I'm currently working on a
functional reactive programming (FRP) framework for processing realtime
events in Q, and most of the underlying concepts should also be
applicable to GUIs. I'll have to think about that some more, but I think
that it would be a nice addition. If anyone would be interested in
participating in such a project then please let me know.

Cheers,
Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag