[reportlab-users] RE: Visual editor: what are the objectives?

[Rajeev Joseph Sebastian]

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 14:09, ma-zo at gmx.at wrote:
> Every toolkit has advantages and disadvantages. The differences are minimal
> and depend on
>  your private preferences. 
I don't think the differences are minimal. Changing over to Qt made our lives 
much easier and coding much faster.
>  wx, gtk provides every year a new major 
> release... so often the
>  opinions are based on products out of date...
Perhaps ...

>
>  The first step in software development is getting requirements....
>  So why discuss about Toolkits ? Its a implementation detail...
>
>  In the long list i found only the two requirements with consent :
>
>  * easy installable (=> provide binaries, see py2exe)
>  * dynamic data input (from oracle, mysql, pythonscript, .???)
>  * A GUI (whats inside ? Which functionality ?)
>
>  I want to add additional basic requirements:
>
>  * cross platform (Windows, Linux => Qt is not GPL under windows).
>  * license L-GPL.
LGPL ? Why ?

>  * please do not implement the 100001st 2-D drawing application (good
> examples for gtk-drawing applications are incscape and dia).
2d drawing is only a small and perhaps the well studied and known aspect of an 
RL Visual Editor. What is more difficult in this case, is to think of a 
design for making reports using the RL framework. For e.g., implementing a 
report-page-section-detail type report would be quite easy (all things being 
equal). However, that would result in an editor which would use very little 
of RL's capabilities. Of course, there is an argument that, "we start with 
something simple and then build afterwards". The key question is not how 
simple: surely we do start with a simple process initially. 

The problem is what should the initial design of the software look like such 
that we can use say 80% of the features of RL in about 8-12 months from now.

>  I suggest to write a generic core framework (without gui dependencies,
> "batch mode", ...) and everybody
>  can write its own GUI-frontend (with Tk, pygtk, QT, wx, fltk, XUL, AJAX,
> .... )
This is logical. But, it is not practical, atleast not now. (I'm not talking 
about "batch mode" here. Batch mode is most surely a part of the target set 
of features.)

-- 
Regards,
Rajeev J Sebastian

Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326