World: r3wp

dataflow: me, carl, richard, nenad, max etc were sitting discussing 
this at the devcon, and nenad asked - i don't see what this is good 
for in practice. carl said, i'd just like the gui part of the thing 
- connecting widgets, so how big is liquid? max said at least 20k, 
to which carl said "too big".

if its going to take a year or two to properly adapt just a few small 
high-level things in the language... I don't see why redesiging view 
should be done in less than a month.

 I think [small] domain-specific GUI's built on View are the way to 
 go.

 -- I agree 100%. Better for RT to give us good docs on how to build 
 those, than trying to build them all in house.


but there should be one more complete/robust one, which will serve 
for 

general" app development" -- There is. Today it's called VID. It's 
not perfect, can be very limiting, and has big holes (e.g. no focus), 
but it's there.


I think the point Gabriele made--that this is how Carl works, and 
we have to live with it--is very important. That's not an easy thing 
to do, but I think getting too many people involved will not work. 
I hope there is a small team of technical people, and that someone 
makes note of what has been requested. I don't expect perfection, 
but I don't think RT will ignore what has been said in the past either.

so, i've looked into the liquid source, i've looked into what max's 
demos etc., and i still can't find an example where we need 20k of 
code. i can do all of that in 2k of code (actually zero, since i 
already want it to be all event based). so, i'm not making a final 
decision here, but i expect carl to chose 0kb over 20kb, functionality 
being the same from his pov (connecting widgets automatically).

but R3 is about finally allowing REBOL to DO real stuff.

Carl talks a lot about programming the large. I hope this aspect 
fits with the GUI as well, so if we can't get a complete GUI, at 
least give us the solid foundation to build it ourselves.

without that nagging bad taste in your mouth every time you try to 
do something where you realise you have to "again" reimplement half 
of what you are working on before even starting.

Agreed Henrik. That is my hope as well.

there are no Dataflow demos out yet.

liquid is not related to GUIs.

comments - we've been getting comments from here (and other various 
private groups) for the past two years or so... now we got to create 
it. i'll work as much as possible so that you guys have docs as soon 
as possible and before things are finalized, but we have to get it 
finalized by 30 june.

Gabriele, noone was thinking commitee aproach here imo :-) But IIRC 
we really talked about forming small group for VID+ era. I can't 
see anything bad on it. And I don't want to be there, because I know 
ppl here, I voiced what I need and I believe guys like Henrik, who 
are doing real-world apps know what we need in that respect ...

The other problem, at the risk of repeating myself, is that we all 
have different needs, so RT is never going to make all of us happy 
no matter what they do.

Gregg: exactly.

Would it hurt to invite those ppl to special World? :-) Or do you 
have enough input thru the years already, that you keep all our wishes 
in mind?

but if we can reuse some of the stuff without fighting our way through 
the code... it'll be godd for all.

(good)

my wish is simple - I want VID like environment, with redesigned 
problematic parts - simply put, it should allow OS like apps creations. 
I don't mind skinning at all, but things like focus, tabbing, accelerator 
keys, disabling/enabling of elements, etc. And probably more general 
VID level event system on-* handlers instead of one engage func.

I hope RT will get input from both Henrik and Ashley because of their 
experience in building on VID and View. More importantly, both of 
them have provided *great* docs.

if we make a new world to discuss this... is this getting us something 
new that has been said / discussed in the past two years or so?

Maxim - well, your stuff is so special, that I don't mind it having 
as a complete separate package, really. The same goes for RebGUI. 
I am ok with that. But I lost 2 ppl because of VID incompletness. 
VID is easy on surface, but difficult for ppl to extend with missing 
concepts - it would mean nearly a rewrite ... THAT is the factor 
I would like to avoid with new VID ... please :-)

well, Ashely actually decided to dump VID.

also, is funny how all this started because i said i wanted to have 
more people involved.

pekr: you mean like GLayout did?  ;-)

:-) I got the that too Gabriele.

not sure - for me it started when it started to be clear that you 
are going to do it in-house, behind the closed door, showing us the 
result only ;-)

Something I sometimes do for RT is collect and sift community input 
for them analyze. I donh't know if they always read it, but I know 
they do sometimes. If people have input they think is important, 
I will be happy to collect it and submit it to RT.

I would prefer that RT would work on the foundation, rather than 
something quick and sloppy that tries barely to cover everything 
like VID does. We'll help with the upper layers of GUI element design. 
That's not design by commitee, but simply compartmentalizing who 
does what. With R3, I had expected the goal to have as small and 
efficient a core as possible, with the rest being open source. Carry 
that philosophy through with the GUI as well, so RT can do a fast 
and efficient basis for a GUI and let actual artists and GUI designers 
work on the GUI.


This way, if some of us want a serious GUI system, we can build that 
and if we want something very fancy and artistic, we can build that 
too and both will not compete with eachother, but supplement eachother 
instead. I hate to see double work done in such a small community.

you know guys, in a sense I already have a 100% working dataflow 
view.  and it took me 2 hours to build the whole gadget architecture 
on it and about 30 minutes to write my first integer field... and 
its all AGG.  and its 100% bug free.

henrik, that is the plan, but the foundation has to provide a bit 
more than just "hey, you have gobs, you can make whatever you want 
with that".

I agree Henrik, with the exception that I want something like VID 
built in, something simple I know will always be there.

but its different... all it would need is a layout dialect (using 
GLayout resizing)

my problem with this situation is that you are judging us before 
we even started doing anything.

I'm using it in elixir, but AGG is a limiting factor right now... 
once it gets to pretty it starts slowing down.

so I really hope gobs will improve this :-)

Sounds very cool Max, is it posted somewhere, or wil it be?

cause all I'll need to do for R3 is replace my internal gob class 
(gel) with them and maybe how I detect the strokes and all.

about 2 weeks probably.

Gregg - I agree, I want some default foundation too. But there is 
one psychological factor to it. Everone naturally tries to use the 
standard. View will have web presence etc. It is what will be used 
by newcomers first. So, that is why I ask for new VID to be more 
feature complete in its roots already, to prevent novice questions 
as - well, how do I know which element is visually in focus? etc.

I am busy (repurating from the lost week going to devcon, am working 
on my house, cause its sunny and want to release revault by next 
monday)

once that is up, I will work on releasing liquidGL and then elixir.

elixir needs a week of polishing before we can start to really build 
tools in it.

petr, that's what we want too and i think we have expressed that. 
if we haven't expressed that enough, let me stress it again.

I hope I can get the liquid net working in time for the release, 
otherwise it will be its first update.

I also remember some aspect (worries) of Chris, who requested layout 
being more like in css world. Dunno what exactly was the request, 
but something like - once you do layout, VID dialect is not live 
anymore (live=tight to changes you make later?) Not sure what was 
his intention here ...

I think I understand, why Carl wants some default foundation. This 
is the same reason why installer was introduced. He wants rebol to 
be adopted by masses, and hence he wants some default VID.

Gabriele, I only think there is a matter of miscommunication. Some 
time ago I joined a private GUI design group in here, which was called 
the official one for R3. I can't remember who started it, but a lot 
of people, including Pekr, joined up. So I started working on concepts 
for integrating an animation system into VID. I think people are 
a little upset, because it felt like RT were going behind our backs 
and wanted to pull R3 GUI in your own very different direction and 
disregard the work we did.

Being a REBOLer from a lot of years being not a guru, especially 
in the GUI area and having suggested REBOL to other programmers I 
wish to share with you my pov that, maybe, can explain the situation. 
The lack of documentation and the initial easyness of VID is a deterrent 
for programmers to adopt REBOL. In the last week I asked Anton for 
help with some VID and styles and he wanted feedback from me. He 
did a few things (an analog clock style and some adjustments to his 
scroll-tables) but make up his and my mind about some design details 
is still not over as need, POVs and uses of the same style can be 
very differents with two people involved (with one being the programmer 
and the other a little user like me). Imagine an as small as you 
wish group and try to figure out the time it needs to decide design. 
Put this together with the pressure of not taking too much time to 
release R3 before July and I think it should be clear why Carl has 
to stop asking opinions (after 2 years) and put more time on coding

official one for R3 - can you point me to any statement from Carl 
on that account? Also, i'm not really pulling to do this myself. 
i would be more than happy to have someone else doing it. you can 
talk to Carl and ask him to let someone else do it.

Gabriele, come on, no need to search for official notes ;-) Or should 
we find some "community involvement" doc via google, which later 
disappeared from RT's site? :-)