Borsalino : An Erlang business project.

[patrickdlogan@REDACTED]

I am interested in discussing the following GUI issue. It may not be
appropriate for the erlang-questions list. If you strongly feel this
should be, or should not be, a part of this mail list, privately
respond to me. I'll tally the results. We could have an "off line"
email discussion and then post a summary back to this list.

Claes Wikstrom writes:
 > 
 >  > After numerous tests and experiments with Erlang and other languages,
 >  > I have finally choosen this language as a basis for my business tools
 >  > developments.
 > 
 > What about GUI for this type of business like apps. Is "etk"
 > (using tk 4.2) good enogh ???

I think it is important to keep in mind the changing landscape of
office systems (as well as home systems, SOHO). Smaller client
systems, remote clients, ever-smaller "clients" that have the
capability of running as a "server", etc. I think it is important to
keep a clear separation between the business end and the input/output
end. That way, a client could be Tk, TCL/Tk, HTML 3.2, XML, Java, or
whatever.

 > I had a look at the swing GUI libs for java the other day
 > and I must say that that sort of GUI looks nice on screen but
 > absoulutley horrible in the source code. Gazzilion little 
 > instantiations of unknown classes with unknown side effects ..
 > ... arghhh.

I think it is important to be able to access a system from a Palm
Pilot-like device as well as from a conference room "whiteboard"-size
device. If a client does use Java/Swing/AWT I think it should be
possible to use a small set of bells and whistles.

Just one other person's opinion, but I concur. Large GUI gadget
applications can be a mess. They also tend not to be very easy to get
right across multiple platforms.

-- 
Patrick D. Logan        mailto:patrickdlogan@REDACTED

"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy."