Skip to main content
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
[nebula-dev] Custom Widget Toolkit
Hi Everyone,

A bit of background - Nicolas is in the process of getting his animation toolkit work, SAT, through an IP review, and I'm working on a proposed sub-project of Nebula called the Custom Widget Toolkit (CWT) to provide a home for tools (like SAT) that help us build better widgets.

There has also been some more discussion about the future direction of the Nebula project itself and how to deal with its scattered release schedule.
Tom has mentioned adding a subproject, called Incubation, that will host new / experimental / whatever widgets that are not ready to join a single unified release schedule.  The base Nebula project will then be comprised only of mature widgets ready to do an official release with a review and all.
The proposed CWT would be a second subproject:
  • Nebula
    • Incubation
    • CWT
Whether CWT is released in-phase with Nebula or not is something for thought and discussion.

Nicolas mentioned that he'd like his animation toolkit to be accessible to more than just Gallery.  After looking it over I asked if he'd be interesting in having it be a part of CWT and he agreed that it seemed to fit there rather well.  Tom then mentioned we should bring this discussion back to the newsgroup because there are other people here who may like to contribute.  I'm sure he's right on that - the topic of reusable widget code has been bounced around here before, and everyone one of the Nebula committers have written something that we all could have used.

The CWT project proposal: http://www.aspencloud.com/cwt
The initial code came out of the CDateTime rewrite (whose CQ has just been approved today so code should be hitting CVS this weekend) but with the addition of things like SAT, that's just a start.

So, as widget developers, what do people think about a project like this?
  • What features would you find most helpful?
  • What features have you been working on that would benefit other Nebula components?
  • How do we coordinate it with SWT's development?  For instance, Chris G. mentioned an animation toolkit may be on the table for e4 - has anyone talked with any SWT dev about this?
  • What about accessing SWT's internal classes? I've been using several to get at things SWT probably won't open up - how do we deal with issues like this?
All questions and comments welcome,
 Jeremy

Back to the top