Re: Project Center inspiration sshots

[Serg Stoyan]

Hello Nicolas,

> 
> Le 3 janv. 05, _ 12:43, Philippe C.D.Robert a _crit :
> >
> > As the name implies, PC should IMHO be the tool which glues together 
> > all steps of a development project. Hence PC shouldn't become a 
> > specialised tool itself, but it should seamlessly integrate such tools 
> > into the development process if needed! Right now there is just Gorm 
> > as an example, but other such tools could be a good visual debugger, a 
> > profiler, a class browser or an UML tool of course.
> 
> Well, I think PC is a good idea, and a necessary old-school IDE for 
> GNUstep (plus compared to many other IDE, it's quite straightforward).
> But I also think it shouldn't be happy with the statu-quo, because 
> there's a lot of possible things you could add in an IDE (like, UML 
> representation, class browser, etc.)

The main goal of current PC development is to create ProjectBuilder like
useable IDE. I think it will be a good starting point for further
development you're talking about.

> I think implementing an ide working at a higher-level (as in 
> http://ide.roard.com) can be done using DevelopmentKit as a starting 
> point.
> The problem we have of course with "high-level" IDE is that in the end, 
> GNUstep works with files and makefiles, and we need
> mechanisms to generate automatically files from high-level structures 
> and vice-versa (the former is already doable using DevelopmentKit,
> the latter is doable but not as easy... though even something not 
> perfect would be a good thing)
> 
> In my opinion, PC should stay as it is for the moment, but hopefully 
> evolves with bundles; so for example you will add some bundles that 
> will let you
> work on a higher-level (in the PC browser, not stop at the files, but 
> allow browsing "high level structures", eg in case of a class, display 
> the list of the
> methods, etc.). So basically, add some possible plugs in PC 
> architecture to be able to extend it in a proper way, so you can browse 
> something
> else than a file easily...

Splitting PC into bundle is not so hard, but anyway there is a lot of thing
that have to be implemented: imporving Build Panel, editor, integration
with GDB an so on. Switching to plugin based architecture can be done at
any time. If I start implementing thing you're talking about we'll never
see an full-featured, working, stable, GNUstep IDE. I'm focusing on
implementing missed features in current PC architecture. Trust me, there is
a lot of work to be done before we can speak about "high level structures".
I like your ideas but this is not proper time for it.

> Additionally, a must-have would also be able to have other 
> representations of your project than the current NSBrowser. For 
> example, an UML view..

Even Project Browser not finished yet. If you've ever seen ProjectBuilder,
you know what I'm talking about.

> Basically, I think instead of writing an IDE from scratch, it could be 
> a good idea to modify PC and extend it.

I'm for it.

-- 
Serg Stoyan