[ghemical-devel] A stupid question

[Tommi Hassinen]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Jean Br=E9fort wrote:

> I think that it would be more easier to track problems if the command
> interpreter was replaced by dialog boxes with clearly identified fields
> (at least for newbies like me). May be I can help. Anyway, I'll study at

Yep, there could be a lot of improvements. I added the command string
system mainly because I wanted to replace an even worse system, which was
direct use of the console window(!) to get some user input. The good side
of the command strings is that one can pass a lot of information in it,
and one can give the user a *chance* to modify it. A dialog or a druid
would be a lot better for the user, but it would take a lot more time to
implement it. If I wish to add a new functionality, it only takes a few
minutes to add a command string parser. Adding a nice dialog could take a
few days... :(  So my plan is first to make a string parser, and perhaps
later implement a nice dialog. The dialog code could then work so that it
internally creates a command string using the input from user, and then
internally feeds the string to the parser ; so no duplicate code needed,
and the traditional command string way could still be availabe (perhaps
for scripting etc in future).

About versions, I would like to get the current v1.51 out as soon as
possible, and I would favor the cvs HEAD version (the bonobo one) for GUI
enhancements. The v1.51 could be released as soon as the use of external
libraries (mopac7, OpenBabel, libghemical) is properly done and tested;
this is not too far any more...

> least some parts of the code to figure out how I can export structures
> from GChemPaint to Ghemical (I'll do that probably within a few months).

I also have some similar plans. I started learning some Java programming
some time ago, and got interested in Jmol (see jmol.sourceforge.net); it's
a Java molecule viewer, nice and fast and available as a stand-alone
program(class) as well as an applet. Perhaps I could add an extension or a
plugin to Jmol capable of passing data from ghemical-server (the server
executable that is required by the bonobo framework anyway). This is just
an idea so far, no further plans yet (sockets? corba? etc). Perhaps we can
discuss about this later?

Regards,

=09Tommi