From: Kevin W. <kw...@co...> - 2008-07-17 16:35:08
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Hi Jason, > > I am sure people here have the skill set to do this, but I think it > simply comes down to having the time like me. Well, I don't have the skills. Could I learn them? Probably. But time is an issue, of course. Should I learn Ajax or Cocoa? To me the answer is pretty obvious. > > No, not required, but when I do something, I do it the best that I can. > I put 110% percent in to everything I do, every aspect. > > Jerry Seinfeld, when asked which episode of Seinfeld was his favorite > replied: "They are all my favorite, I did the best I could with each one". > > For me, I want every aspect of the project I have undertaken to be the > best it can be. As a philosophy, I can't argue with this, although it assumes the luxury of abundant time. If time is scarce, then you must prioritize. > > I have put a lot of time thus far into the TCL/TK Cocoa Port, the IB > plugins, the xCode plugins and even started a kext extension. But all of > this effort, something has to give and that this far has ben the > website, my way to communicate my progress to others that are interested. That makes sense. And once the website is up, all this will be water under the bridge. I have to say, I am very curious to see what you are coming up with. What, for instance, is the kernel extension for? I'm not aware of anything in Tk's C API that requires a kernel extension. > > I am surprised that ActiveState is not offering more help. Are they a > small company? I am not sure TCL/TK is a big market for them? I think that you will see more offers of help once you get some code released and the community can have something to look at, play with, hack on. That's why more than one person has suggested using Google code or SourceForge as a hosting site. At this time, we have nothing to evaluate. You've dropped some hints about what you're doing--Xcode integration and the like--but until there's some actual code to see, then you will be working alone. It's understandable that you haven't released anything. That take time. If I were doing the port myself, I would keep development closed until I had something that others could build. Even an alpha-stage release, with lots of incomplete and broken stuff, takes a lot of time to reach. In the interest of providing constructive feedback, I do need to say that what you have said thus far about the project differs very greatly from what I envisioned it being. Integration with Xcode and Interface Builder, the kernel extension, and the other hints you've dropped make your project sound more like PyObjC or RubyCocoa: a Tcl wrapper for the Cocoa frameworks. What I (and probably others) had envisioned was a project that re-implemented Tk-Aqua on top of the Cocoa frameworks, rather than the Carbon frameworks. This wouldn't require Interface Builder; it would simply mean grinding though an awful lot of C code in the tk/macosx source tree and replacing Carbon calls with their closest equivalent Cocoa calls (and rewriting those bits in Objective-C in the process). This would allow Tk-Cocoa to function pretty much as a drop-in replacement for Tk-Carbon and largely preserve Tk's cross-platform API compatibility at the script level, while at the same time allowing developers to build Tk applications on the Mac as 64-bit. (The 64-bit feature is what is driving all of this: Apple is only supporting Cocoa's GUI components as 64-bit, not Carbon's. If 64-bit Carbon were in the mix, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.) It's entirely possible that I'm off the mark here, and if so, please correct me--if your project implements that 64-bit/API-compatible goodness and offers Xcode integration to boot, wonderful! But I need to emphasize that the 64-bit question is probably what will garner the most support from the community, including the corporate members. I don't think ActiveState will contribute resources, financial or otherwise, to Xcode integration, as that would compete directly with their products. On the other hand, if this project allows them to deploy the Tcl Dev Kit on top of Cocoa, then it would certainly be in their interests to contribute to this project! --Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com |