I would like to make a few comments and raise a few questions
PHP is a software enabling access to a function reference base base organised by groups.
Ex. Database : MySQL, PgSQL, Oracle
As far as I know there is no stand alone php mysql project
Why PHP GTK would be one ?
Probably due to the scale of the project (mysql has ~20 functions, gtk has > 900)
Merging that kind of documentation into the main manual would not be a good idea..
Why shouldn’t we think of a wrapper system that would run with GTK1, 2, Cocoa, Carbon and maybe Windows UI ?
GTK2 is supposted to be that wrapper system, there are backends for Coca/Win32 etc.
The only other significant candidate for this is wxWindows.
Why shouldn’t we call this project PHP-UI ?
Indeed I have been working for six months on a wrapper system, up to now, I have drawn what would be necessary to make it
My point is not to discuss what has been done up to now, I just think that PHP could have a bigger impact on final developpers. In addition, it would make doc creation easier
I've looked at this a number of times, The main reason to use GTK is that it is by far the easiest to write bindings for (it was actually part of the design goal). KDE / wxWindows / Gecko's UI stuff, are all written in C++ and are pretty difficult to write bindings to in comparison.
There was a limited working GTK2/PHP5 branch in CVS, I'm certian it doesnt build with current PHP5, but It probably would not take too much to fix.
The brick wall we ran into before was
$gtkobject->style['BG_COLOR'] = new GtkColor('#ffcccc');
the dereferencing of arrays in the PHP5 objects was not working when I stopped working on it.
Regards
Alan
I may be wrong but I am open to comments
If you find it fine, I will dedicate some time to work on this subject.
Regards
-mike
On 16 juil. 04, at 16:26, Steph wrote:
Rhys: we already _have_ a centrally managed effort..
-----Original Message-----
From: Rhys Campbell [mailto:rhys.campbell@da-systems.co.uk]
Sent: 16 July 2004 13:07
To: PHP-GTK Mailing List (E-mail)
Subject: RE: [PHP-GTK] what is going on with gtk.php.net?
OK, seems like not many people are with me on this. The ants
anology is good, but like ants I think people will tend to leave
the not so sweet parts. Anyway this post has generated a lot of
traffic so there's obviously a lot of interest in the issue. I
think the idea of a cenrally managed effort is a good one, but
you may be right about it not getting used. Bit sad really as you
can see the good Sun have done on the documentation for Java (a
rival of PHP-GTK????). I'll start thinking about what I can do
this weekend and stop pestering this list with my rantings.
Regards,
Rhys
-----Original Message-----
From: Steph [mailto:steph@zend.com]
Sent: 16 July 2004 12:23
To: Rhys Campbell; PHP-GTK Mailing List (E-mail)
Subject: RE: [PHP-GTK] what is going on with gtk.php.net?
Obviously I'm not saying throw away the present manual there is a
lot of useful information there. But the old saying goes "Too
many cooks spoil the broth.". What I'm saying is that central
management of the documentation is needed to be effective, i.e.
you look at this widget and document all \ or many of its
properties, methods ect according to these guidlines \ standards,
formal methods, or whatever. This work could then be submitted to
a project leader(s) for review which would then be passed back
for corrections or included into the manual. I'm sure, like
myself, many have busy lives but if we work with common aims on
this I think it can be done. Having people randomly work on
sections will not produce a coherant manual - central management
and review is the key.
Getting any material at all would be pretty key from where I'm standing :)
The more complex the process, the less likely you are to see anyone going
through with it. 'Having people randomly work on sections' is _exactly_
what the php.net manual guys do; OSS documentation, like OSS
anything else,
is better demonstrated by watching a nest-ful of ants retrieve a
teaspoonful
of sugar than by anything else I can think of. There's already control
there, in the form of other users, in the form of user notes, and in the
form of peer review (quite a few people have CVS karma for the manual, but
most of them are translators rather than initiators). It's much easier to
get information corrected than it is to get information there in the first
place; witness this list, and the amount of flak the PHP-GTK
manual's taken
over the years for incompleteness, versus the amount of people who have
contributed original material to it. It's always easier to criticise
existing work than it is to produce any.
At php.net nowadays, the docs team request that new functionality (and new
extensions) are initially documented by the person that wrote that
functionality or extension. This isn't an option we have here; Andrei's
contributed a couple of classes to the manual (and it took him a lot less
time than it would've taken me), but we can hardly ask him to
document 100+
classes in his spare time. Even if he had any. He automated what he could
and left the rest for people to fill in. In other words, at present -
still - if there are no signals and no properties outlined in a PHP-GTK
class, it's safe to say that that class has never been touched by anyone
writing documentation.
I should maybe make the secondary point that the GTK+ 1.2.* project itself
had the same documentation problems we face here. That manual was never
completed either. The documentation for GTK 2 is similarly generated but
was better thought through, with the developers getting involved to
introduce new concepts.
I'm blathering. Sorry :) but all this stuff does need thinking about
before anyone goes to the trouble of setting up an environment that won't
get used, or a second manual, or anything along similar lines.
- Steph
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