[Pipet Devel] Another XML proposal - Part 3.

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Maybe we can keep the polished GUI as a script, and if Loci needs a new viewer
it can get a transient GUI script and check for the binary widgets on the local
Loci installation.

If some binary widgets are not present, the user can be prompted about
downloading _them_ from whatever source.

This way the local installation of Loci will have a collection of small,
versatile and modular binary widgets, not a collection of large viewers that may
not be used.

As opposed to making all of the viewers binary (the traditional way of doing
this sort of thing) and static, scripted viewers will allow incredible
flexibility in the design of GUI loci.  Imagine writing a viewer that combines
sequence and structure widgets in the same view.  This would be much simpler
using the approach of "micro scripts, mega widgets" than writing a compiled
executable from scratch.

I'm not saying that anyone suggested all binary viewers.  But going with a
viewer that is large enough to need a separate downloading, is not much
different.

How small can we make these GUI scripts?  How large will our GUI megawidget
library have to be?


Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                  mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu
Boston College Chemistry      http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/
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