Tuesday, 07 May, 2002

Tuesday, and more stuff going on.

http://80211b.weblogger.com/2002/05/06 is an interesting site with news on wireless networking. A good use of blogging, too, I think.

• Project Manager X: Rebuilding the FoxPro Project Manager from Inside
  • Basic Design Guidelines
    • Project Manager accessed as a hidden controller
    • Support for multiple user interfaces
    • Support for multiple project hooks

Project Manager X: Rebuilding the FoxPro? Project Manager from Inside

The Project Manager built into FoxPro? solves about 99% of the needs o f most developers, but the remainder can be frustratingly hard to reach. This project is designed to create several layers of programmable, extensible interfaces that will allow developers to create and share the add-ons that they need for their projects.

Basic Design Guidelines

The challenge with the design is that we cannot be sure what needs the next developer will have, so we want to make a set of interfaces most easy to access, difficult to break, and good at cooperatively having multiple extensions share access.

Project Manager accessed as a hidden controller

The project manager itself needs to be instantiated as an invisible object, visible only through the PMX programming interfaces. This will prevent inadvertant interference.

Support for multiple user interfaces

One of the key features will be support for multiple user interfaces. A “Classic” user interface can duplicate much of the functionality of the original Project Manager. An “Explorer” interface can present a treeview and file list interface. A “Favorites” tab can be added. Perhaps the ability to dynamically define organizational schemes is needed by some. A toolbar interface to add additional tools might be needed. The design key here is that the user inteface need not dictate the underlying inteface of the PMX. Separation of UI from business logic.

Support for multiple project hooks

Toni Feltman has a great design in ProjectHookX? that allows chaining of multiple well-behaved project hooks. This needs to be supported.