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From: oster@well.sf.ca.us (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: AppMaker (really, application generator)
Message-ID: <22881@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 25 Jan 91 08:09:32 GMT
References: <218@genco.bungi.com> <1991Jan20.151151.22107@ida.liu.se> <219@genco.bungi.com>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 36

It would be so easy to take the THINK Class Library, THINK C compiler
integrated environemnt a step further, and have an integerated environment
with a program editor that let you pick menus, controls, panes, and palettes
from a palette on the screen, and paste them into an application. This
would cause the approproate code resource to get pasted into your project,
with corresponding automatically generated source files.

Almost all the code in a user's application prototype
would be short, simple glue routines to calls to standard objects.

At any time, you can subclass objects in the integerated environment's library
to create a new and richer application development tool, you could even
use a source code management system to have different versions of the
development tool on the same machine, each customized for writing different
classes of applications, and all sharing common code.

This tool would simply blow away MacApp's ViewEdit, and Next's NextStep
because it would leverage off the THINK C project idea, and the other two
environments are saddled with a traditional edit/compile/link/run development
cycle.

It would be easy to write, because once you laid the correct foundation,
it would leverage off of itself, and be easy to extend.

I know, you are going to tell me it already exists, and it is called Smalltalk.
Well, Smalltalk is good for writing Smalltalk applications, but I am
not convinced it is good for writing Mac applications. Can you do a "Make
Application" to create a stand-alone binary that doesn't have large
chunks of the authoring portion of the development system in it?

At the very least, we should be pushing our industrial-grade development
systems in this direction, instead of spending all our effort on the 
micor-baytch of compiling a text file fast.
-- 
-- David Phillip Oster - At least the government doesn't make death worse.
-- oster@well.sf.ca.us = {backbone}!well!oster