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presentation actions - how can I live without them?

    Date: Wed, 13 Feb 1991 07:20 EST
    From: Peter Paine <p2@porter.asl.dialnet.symbolics.com>

	Date: Sun, 10 Feb 91 17:44:50 EST
	From: Richard Shapiro <rshapiro@arris.com>

	>If you think you want presentation actions, you are probably wrong.

	[...]

    I am rather lost.

    We continue to develop a GUI substrate (called the Jin system) which
    provides a variety of buttons, switches, thumb wheels, dials, sliders
    etc. as the kernel of reusable utilities.

Let's call these "gadgets"...

    All interaction is through the mouse.
    The logic of presentation actions seems to be appropriate.

    Indeed, the intrusion of any form of interactor dependencies is both an
    overhead and very unwelcome.

    Being a believer in staying with the common-denominator philosophies of
    software use and development, I am at a loss to see where I have parted
    company with CLIM - our great hope for the delivery of the sort of lisp
    applications that customers want and will buy.

    Any explanations would be gratefully received.

Gadgets are a very special case that I should have mentioned.  I failed
to mention them because I believe that management of gadgets properly
falls *below* the level of CLIM applications proper, and belongs in a
part of CLIM the manages gadgets.  Where you have "parted" with CLIM is
that CLIM does not currently support gadgets adequately; this is being
worked on now by people at ILA, and forms the conceptual nucleus of CLIM
Release 2.

In the absence of CLIM support for gadgets, it is a reasonable strategy
to use presentation actions to implement the controls for gadgets.  This
is because the control of the gadgets need not be mediated by the command
loop of the application.

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