Re: Application framework

Sounds really great - not sure where my time is to help out on this.. but heres a few ideas/suggestions.. Regards Alan Michael Dransfield wrote:

I am looking into the possibility of an (GTK) Application framework for PEAR, something like NetBeans Platform for java (www.netbeans.org). I would like the groups thoughts on if this could be done and what would need to be included to make it easy to write applications. I am thinking that there would be a base application which would set up the main window (menu and status bar etc) and then additional modules which can be loaded to provide additional functionality (user authentication, text editing facilities). People can write additional modules which can also be contributed to PEAR.

I would class that under glade tools : based on the existing work done in this area... - Glade emulator -for bugging Win32 .. although this may not be needed in GTK2, we'll have to wait and see.. - Tools to Auto create object Vars/Callback methods by parsing Glade XML files. I guess a bootloader = eg. load up a glade window, do some depnedancy checks = for a base class to be extended. Menu tools - simple ways to create add to menus... maybe

Below is what I have managed to come up with so far. Please feel free to comment.

Dialog Class.. - I would think a generic dialog class would go before wizard.. (ok, cancel) - set up parent/child relationships.. - add callbacks to it..

Wizards

    - Ability to load a number of frames along with actions to be caried out at each click of the next button.
    - Clean-up facility if cancelled.

Sounds Ok, not sure what is meant by clean up.. -

Authentication

    - Taken care of with PEAR Auth package, would probably need extending to show login box etc.

The idea may be to abstract the Authentication Part into Auth, and the display parts into Auth_HTML or HTML_Auth, GTK_Auth.. which rendered login boxes..

Logging

    - Mostly catered for in pear already.

Modules

    - Ability to dynamically load gui and menu items along with their relavent actions.
    - osCommerce (oscommerce.org) has a nice module system which could be partly copied

Not seen that.. I did a stupid thing a long time ago - converting osCommerce into a functional base PHP app, - never again :) The two module approaches I've seen are to have a module directory that is parsed (eg. opendir()) to find available modules or just list them manually in a config file....

Auto Update

    - Either using a diff system or replacing whole files
    - Ability for the user to turn this feature on and off

Really should start looking at the bcompiler/phpembed combination on windows now.. - this is now all in CVS, and provides the posiblity to do exe files for PHP.. - this would be the ideal distribution method for desktop stuff.. - in which case diffs are a bit difficult..

Form generation / validation

    - Something like OOForms, im not sure if this could be extended or if it is easier to write a seperate class all together (probably easier to do this)

yeah - this is a bit complex.. I dont know OOForms that well, but I did it in phpmole, to the extent of mapping Data to Glade Forms

UI Features

    - File loading and project routines to ease loading of files

theres something in the pear gtk installer that does directory browsing as a 'addin widget' - this could be grown to do the whole set.. - dir/file etc.

Config / Options

    - Config classes exist in pear which can be extended to provide a user interface to the options

pear installers's gtk config stuff is not too bad.. - provides a Aqua like design for configuration.

Caching of remote database

    - For offline working.  Maybe can include an offline update facility where changes locally are queued until the user is online and updates to the remote database can be done.  Hashes of each row could be stored and compared at update time to check that no other changes have taken place.

Cheers Mike