Re: GUI

[Bruno Haible <haible@ilog.fr>]

[Message forwarded from Joachim Schrod <schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>.]

>>>>> "JH" == Jorg-Cyril Hohle <Joerg.Hoehle@gmd.de> writes:

>> Garnet
>> +: Advanced OO design
>> +: Many widgets
>> +: Written in Lisp
>> -: Windows port missing
JH> Back in 1993 our project was looking for a GUI tool running on top of
JH> CMUCL. A student of ours evaluated Garnet and GINA.
JH> 			+: powerful, but
JH> 			-: huge
JH> 			-: very slow
JH> 			-: own OO, not CLOS

Hmmm.
			+: own protoype-instance based OO system, not CLOS
			-: research project, not meant for production-use

As much as I like CLOS and use it in many tasks, a prototype-instance
based OO system is much better as a base for interactive GUI
development environments. Garnet is not a production-use system and
never was -- but it showed what could be possible by adding
programming-by-demonstration to the method toolbox of a UI designer.
Garnet is more than a toolkit, it's a complete development environment
that explored new techniques for the first time; alone the work on
distinguishing interactors and other UI elements (pioneered in Myers'
Ph.D.) has shown the way for many future systems. One cannot compare a
research system like Garnet to a real-world system like Tk or other
low-level widget class libraries.

Of course, the single-way constraint resolver used in Garnet is
nowadays accepted to be indequate. That's the reason why it's replaced
by a multi-way constraint resolver in Amulet. Btw, in the discussion
that's going on on this list Amulet is not a UI development system to
look at; it's specifically targeted towards C++, it's base
abstractions are not easily transported to CL.

Cheers,
	Joachim

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