Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
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From: Philip Haynes <p.haynes@oose.com.au>
Subject: Re: Moving from VA to IBM Smalltalk
Message-ID: <313F6432.4B12@oose.com.au>
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Organization: Object Oriented Pty Ltd
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 22:33:22 GMT
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James O'Connor wrote:
> 
> ALL -
>   I'm curious, has anybody been using VisualAge and the Composition
> Editors and turned from it to do straight IBM Smalltalk coding?  I'm
> looking at doing that.  I want more control over the dynamic creation of
> windows.  I have a lot of objects that are composite objects, but the
> composition is really variable.  I want to be able to create widgets
> dynamically based on the composition.  I messed a little with using #show
> and #hide actions...just didn't seem like a good design.
>   Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had decided to forego the VA
> Comp.Editor stuff for pure Smalltalk.  I think with a good handle on the
> hierarchy and widget parts, it could be almost as fast to develop in as
> VA; and much less resource hungry...
> James,

Our experience with VA is that the composition editor is a nice place
to start if you are new to Smalltalk & that it is a great marketing
tool for managers, but, the paradigm breaks down with real applications.

Consequently, for larger developments we reccommend that IBM Smalltalk
be used with WindowBuilder as the screen painting tool. This, in our
experience achieves most of the benefits of the the composition
editor, without the overhead. (ie we have been training business
analysts to use WindowBuilder, its that easy). We also suppliment this
by writing an infrastructure to map between attributes in models & 
fields on screens, to minimise the overhead in building simple
database forms.

Regards
Phil.


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