[Snow-devel] Snow appreciation & questions

[Alessio Stalla]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Matus Kmit <simply.nitaai at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> First of all i would like to express my appreciation for this project.
> i like the concept of a Lisp-based DSL for creating portable
> Java-based GUI applications, without having to use the Java syntax.
> i'd love to use it for my personal projects.

Hi, thanks for the kind words! This is an idea I like a lot; I
actually restarted the project from scratch a few times while my
experience matured.

> My decision to start actively using it is however hampered by the
> following opened questions:
>
> 1. Is this project still being developed?

It's been on hiatus for quite some time. It's a sort of catch-22: I
don't want to build the project for myself only (unless I start using
Swing in my daily job, but that won't happen in the foreseeable
future), I need users to be motivated; but users need a complete, well
tested library, not a clever proof of concept.

> 2. How is its current state of implementation? How many and which
> swing components are implemented?

It's definitely unfinished. The core is mostly done, modulo bugs of
course; but only very few widgets are covered and then very few
properties of them are covered. Certainly less than what is needed for
a real application. However, adding new ones is tedious, but not hard,
and I am willing to add what you need the most urgently. Besides
widgets, there are a few outstanding things that I've long postponed:
- The loading process is way too cumbersome. I need some support from
ABCL to make it work better, but things seem to be moving in the right
direction with ASDF and binary-only jars.
- I'd love to have a good graphical debugger and inspector. They're
only sketched for now.
- I'm unsure about the dependency on Cells. In the meantime I've
written a very lightweight data flow library that could probably
replace Cells in Snow.
- Someone on IRC suggested introducing a jQuery-like API and I liked the idea.
and probably other things as well.

> 3. What about the documentation? i have seen that it is quite
> incomplete and kind of work in progress...

Yes, it is incomplete. You might be able to live with what little is
there + the Swing API docs + the MiG Layout cheat sheet, but certainly
it's far from optimal.

> 4. Why cannot one access cvs and docs repository?!

Ugh, it seems common-lisp.net is broken, other projects have the same
issue too. The site was moved not long ago, that might be the cause.
I'll ask the admins about it asap.

Bye,
Alessio