[Pipet Devel] J.W. Bizzaro; TODO 20000218

[Brad Chapman]

Jeff;
	Thanks for getting this together! I *really* hope to be back at
programming soon, as I'm going to be ill if I spend any more time staring
at Microsoft Word and typing about cactus...
Comments below:

> J.W. Bizzaro; TODO 20000218
> ----------------------------------
> 1.  Split gi workspace up into many more modules to keep things easy to manage.

This is a really good idea. I was thinking it might be helpful to add a
new connector/dot class (which will probably be needed once dots get more
complicated). Then we could move the event stuff for dots/lines to this
class and also move the locus event stuff to the locus class. 

> 2.  Make windowlets resizable via dragging frame.

Do we still need this if we have "automatically scrolling windows"?

> 3.  Add multiple locus selection to gi workspace.  SHIFT-button1 and
>     CTRL-button1 will do this.

This would be really helpful--they we could start setting up simple piping
stuff (ie. a document to a viewer). 

> 4.  Work on locus deletion.  Brad started this.  There should be 2 types:
>     (1) complete removal and (2) change to a composite locus, which uses (1).
> 5.  Work on locus disconnection via pop-up menu over connector.

Let me know if the stuff I did makes sense when you start looking at this.
I might be able to make it cleaner/more usable if there are problems.

> 6.  Add windowlets to locus connectors.  These will give connector status/info.
> 7.  Pop-up menu needs to reflect the item selected: locus, connector or
>     workspace.

Don't forget about my button 3 "fix." We'll need to think of something new
to do for this if you want to start adding more functionality to the
pop-up menu.

> 8.  For the time being, I want locus addition to take place via DnD with
>     containers.  The 'Add' pop-up submenu in the end will be for adding MIME
>     and connection type-compatible loci to other loci.  We're a long way from
>     doing that, so I want to remove it (Brad).

Okay, that shouldn't be too big a problem for most stuff since we have
drag and drop working.
However, what about database stuff--right now I'm connecting through a
blank added container. How would this work under the new system?

> 9.  We need a locus clipboard for doing copy/cut/paste of loci.  I think this
>     should be a subtype of the composite locus type and able to be placed on
>     the workspace.

Do you have a plan for keeping these type of containers out of the way?
Have a toolbar contiainer of useful loci? You could drag them out of the
toolbar to add stuff to them, but when they get deleted from the
workspace, they go right back to the toolbar. Is this an idea?

> 10. Loci needs to start up with a few loci already on the workspace:
>     containers.

Maybe this would be how to deal with the database problem I mentioned
earlier?

> 11. Establish communication pipe with middleware.  NOTE that the gi workspace
>     is a 'dumb' front-end to the middleware, and that some of what has been
>     hard-coded into the gi workspace (by Brad) needs to be abstracted out to
>     the middleware.

You are absolutely right about this. The middleware and frontware XML
stuff is especially tangled. I've started to untangle it, and this what
I'll be working on asap. I think I have a better model for how this can
work and how I can extract things to be nicer. A lot of that ugliness are
my kludges to make things work when I didn't really have a view about how
all the code would look in the long term. I see some things a little
clearer now, and I definately think fixing this up should be a priority
for me so that we'll have less code breaking in the future.

Thanks again for the ToDo list! 

Brad