[Snow-devel] Snow appreciation & questions

[Matus Kmit]

Hi Allessio

Thanks for Your answer. i requirements for the available components
are quite modest as per now, as the application is also quite simple
(although it might get more sophisticated in the future).

to start, i will surely need to following: frame, panels, buttons and
dropdowns with all their most important attributes.

in the future i might add menu bar and some of the look-and-feel components...

if suppose the above mentioned components are already integrated?

Good to know that You are willing to add components, which i will need
:-) That's kind.

Best wishes,
Matus


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Alessio Stalla
<alessiostalla at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>