[Pipet Devel] Overflow/gms integration into Piper

[Brad Chapman]

Hello all;
    I've just checked in a bunch of changes that allow Piper to be 
able to both save and load workflow-diagrams in a format compatible 
with Overflow (well, the saving part has been around for a while). 
This means that, at least for simple cases, we are able to make a 
work-flow-diagram in Overflow, save it, and load it up in Piper (and 
vice versa).
    This is pretty snazy, and I'd like to start working to expand it 
further so that all Overflow saved files can be opened in Piper. To do 
this, I'd like to have more Overflow 'node' types to play with, so 
that I can do crazier things and don't get too fixated on just making 
a couple of cases.
    Jean-Marc has written a snazzy perl script which can generate xml 
files for 'nodes' based on the information in the C++ 
header/implementation file. What I'd like to try and do is use this to 
generate the xml files for all the nodes at compile time, so then we 
don't need to distribute all of these millions of XML files with 
Piper, and also so that we can change XML formats if we need to 
without having to change a billion XML files.
    So in order to do this, we would need to have the Overflow C++ 
files in the piper module. So, I was wondering about how people felt 
about putting Overflow and also GMS into Piper as bl and pl 
directories, respectively. I've talked with Jarl about this a bit and 
I think he might almost be ready to do this. From Overflow, I would 
just like to put in the 'data-flow' directory for now, since this will 
give us the "basic" nodes for doing things. Putting things into Piper 
will also bring us closer to integration, which I also like :-).
    So, what does everything think about this? Objections? Thoughts? 
Comments? Are there better ways to move forward? 
    Thanks for listening!

Brad