[mcclim-devel] Status?

[C Y]

List has been a tad quiet lately - is anything going on at the moment? 
I've seen a few comments here and there about R-trees but the list has
been alarmingly quiet.  So I'll make some noise :-).

(BTY, nevermind my spec license question - presumably since it's being
distributed with McCLIM it's at least LGPL compatible, which is good
enough.)

I have a question about Backends, or rather what it takes to make one. 
Is there any kind of template somewhere in the spec, a "Provide all of
these graphical abilities and IO routines and you have a valid Backend"
kind of document?  The Beagle backend, as near as I can tell, loads clx
and then provides Cocoa parts in a gradual shift from clx to Cocoa, but
it's not clear to me how a developer knows what to implement and what
it needs.  The clx backend, presumably the most complete one, is a bit
intimidating.  The keyboard IO stuff is a bit scary (I suppose that
really is a hard topic but only the graphical toolkit people ever run
into it).  Also, if one wants to provide higher level interfacing, for
example create an McCLIM menu gadget and tie that directly to GTK's
menu API instead of lower level McCLIM gadgets, how would one go about
that?

I'm sort of curious if McCLIM+lambdagtk could make a reasonably modern
looking CLIM, and GTK provides high level functionality which would be
nice to use, but I'm a bit at sea as to how to approch this from an
McCLIM backend perspective.  My instinct is to go top down, tying high
level functionality in the spec to high level toolkit functionality and
working down to lower level objects, but obviously the clx backend only
interfaces to the outside world through the clx communication bridge,
and has to implement everything else it needs on top of that.  Beagle
is presumably working at a somewhat higher level since it's getting
some Aqua look and feel working but I haven't really understood how
that's being handled yet.  Can somebody recommend a "McCLIM backends
for dummies" guide?  Some place in the spec perhaps?  I'll keep digging
but I though maybe someone could put me out of my misery and point me
in the best direction to head.

Cheers,
CY


		
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