[Freecats-Dev] About Freecats' future development(s)

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

As the list is a bit too silent for me, I'll just sum up a few news, most of
which came to me through private e-mails.  That way, I'll also keep
everybody up to date.


GUI builders
--------------
Personally, I can't say I obtained much results with the Python GUI builder
I tried recently (wxGlade). This is not to say it does not work, simply that
I don't have enough background to really do things by myself. I might end up
working on paper.

I just checked, but even though the activity stats on Source Forge are very
high, I first thought no new release of Boa Constructor came out since the
current 0.2.3 alpha version, from March 31 - in fact, release 0.2.6 is
available via CVS (no major version jump here), even though I would much
prefer a simple executable file to download and install.

Did anybody hear about WideStudio ( C++, Perl, Python, Ruby), or can
somebody suggest alternatives for quickly building portable GUIs?


OOxlate, Frankenstein
--------------------------
I could not try yout Dan's OOxlate, as I don't have any Linux machine at
hand presently. I hope somebody could, and I would be glad to hear about
it - as well as Dan also, of course :-)

Julien told me he had a try at Frankenstein, and he did not find it that
inspiring - I believe this is the same problem with this type of software,
an interesting try, but not exactly what we are looking for.


API
----
As I did not hear from Dan about our previous API-related talks, I hope we
can continue to examine the few differences with his approach and end up
agreeing on a fully common ground.

Eric Cousin, teacher and researcher from ENST Bretagne's IT department,
recently had a quite detailed look at our specification documents. What did
come out of it yet? Simply that it seems the work done in them is a good
start, but I was glad to hear this, especially from Eric.

So, even though no code writing has started, I'll take this opportunity to
remind the 36 members of the list that we don't start from nothing any more,
and I do hope that the ones who are experienced developers will keep
discussing it in order to continue suggesting sound choices... and even
begin coding, of course!


And now...
-------------
For instance, now that the data structure has been rather accurately
defined, I'd be happy to see more coming on the following topics:
- data storage
- TU indexing (I hope to read more from Tim Morley on this)
- client/server framework (Dan recently told us about SOAP over HTTP, but
I'd like to read more about the idea of an Apache plug-in versus some
framework alternatives)
... and whatever else you may want to discuss.


Cheers,

Henri