it occurred to me that effectively we abandoned the use of
a business facade and proxy model in the UI. The connection
becomes entirely message based now.
To put that into context, the originally intended architecture
never came to life. The UI development stalled before this could
happen; possibly it was also hampered by the "impedance mismatch"
between our intentions in the core and such a classical, model centric
architecture. Joel several times complained that he felt blocked; but
I did not really understand this issue. Only recently, when I came to
adapting the timeline display to GTK-3, I realised the model centric
approach can not possibly work with such an open model as intended
in our case. It would lead to endless cascades of introspection.
these are just empty class files, but writing a basic description
for each made me flesh out a lot of organisational aspects of what
I am about to build now
...it seemed first that we'd might run into a very fundamental problem;
but after some consideration it turns out the interspersed display manager
and the decoupling between model/presenter and widget happens to mitigate
this problem as well.
the content of the "GuiTimelineWidgetStructure" tiddler is
actually related to architecture questions related to custom widgets
in general, plus working notes regarding an investigation of the
Gtk::Layout widget.
bottom line
- seems we need to do that manually
- must wait until in the on_draw() callback
- use Container::foreach() to visit all child widgets
- Layout::set_size()
- define tasks to be addressed during investigation
- read documentation, identify problematic aspects
- prepare a child widget class to be placed on the canvas
actually this is a pragmatic extension for some special use cases,
and in general rather discurraged, since it contradicts the
established diff semantics. Yet with some precaution, it should
be possible to transport information via an intermediary ETD
Map -> ETD -> Map
at first, this seemed like a good idea, but it caused already
numerous quirks and headache all over the place. And now, with
the intent to switch to the TreeMutator based implementation,
it would be damn hard to retain these features, if at all
possible.
Thus let's ditch those in time and forget about it!
this is a subtle change in the semantics of the diff language,
actually IMHO a change towards the better. It was prompted by the
desire to integrate diff application onto GenNode-trees into the
implementation framework based on TreeMutator, and do away with
the dedicated implementation.
Now it is a matter of the *selector* to decide if a given layer
is responsible for "attributes". If so, then *all* elements within
this layer count as "attribute" and an after(Ref::ATTRIBS) verb
will fast forward behind *the end of this layer*
Note that the meta token Ref::ATTRIBS is a named GenNode,
and thus trivially responds to isNamed() == true
This is the first skeleton to combine all the building blocks,
and it passes compilation, while of course most of the binding
implementation still needs to be filled in...
this is at the core of the integration problem: how do we expose
the ability of some opaque data structure to create a TreeMutator?
The idea is
- to use a marker/capability interface
- to use template specialisation to fabricate an instance of that interface
based on the given access point to the opaque data structure
overall, the structure of this implementation is still rather confusing,
yet any alternatives seem even less convincing
- if we want to avoid the delegation to base-class, we'd have
to duplicate several functions and the combined class would
handle two distinct concerns.
- any attempt to handle the IDs more "symmetrically" seems to
create additional problems on one side or the other
the idea is again to perform the same sequence of primitives,
this time with a binding to some local variables within the test function
here to enact the role of "object fields"
together with drafting the first segment of the test code,
I've settled down onto an implementation approach
..as concluded from the preceding analysis.
NOTE this entails a semantical change, since this
predicate is now only meant to be indicative, not conclusive
remarks: the actual implementation of the diff application process
as bound via the TreeMutator remains yet to be written...
how can ordinary object fields be treated as "Attributes"
and thus tied into the Diff framework defined thus far.
This turns out to be really tricky, even questionable
write down a first draft for a definiton section,
to describe the fundamental parts involved, when
applying a diff message onto implementation defined
data structures
After a break of tree weeks, I found it difficult to find may way
amidst all those various levels of abstraction. In addition to this
definition, we'll probably also need a high level overview of the
whole diff system operation.
...all of this implementation boils down to slightly adjusting
the code written for the test-mutation-target. Insofar it pays off now
having implemented this diagnostic and demonstration first.
Moreover I'm implementing this basic scheme of "diff application"
roughly the fourth time, thus things kindof fall into place now.
What's really hard is all those layers of abstraction in between.
Lesson learned (after being off for three weeks, due to LAC and
other obligations): I really need to document the meaning of the
closures, and I need to document the "abstract operational semantics"
of diff application, otherwise no one will be able to provide
the correct closures.
while I still keep my stance not to allow reflection and
switch-on-type, access to the internal / semantic type of
an embedded record seems a valid compromise to allow
to deal with collections of object-like children
of mixed kind.
Indirectly (and quite intentional) this also opens a loophole
to detect if a given GenNode might constitute a nested scope,
but with the for the actual nested element indeed to cary
a type symbol. Effectively this limits the use of this shortcut
to situations where the handling context does have some pre-established
knowledge about what types *might* be expected. This is precisely
the kind of constraint I intend to uphold: I do not want the
false notion of "total flexibility", as is conveyed by introspection.
...and write down some insights about the architecure
and design of tree binding and tree description related
to the TreeMutator.
When reading my notes from last year, it became clear
to me that the design of the TreeMutator has evolved
significantly, and became quite something different
than I'd imagined at start
after sleeping one night over the problem, this seems to be
the most natural solution, since the possibility of assignment
naturally arises from the fact that, for tree diff, we have
to distinguish between the *identity* of an element node and
its payload (which could be recursive). Thus, IFF the payoad
is an assignable value, why not allow to assign it. Doing so
elegnatly solves the problem with assignment of attributes
Signed-off-by: Ichthyostega <prg@ichthyostega.de>
This basically finishes definition of the fundamental
UI-Element and Bus protocol -- with one notable exception:
how to mutate elements by diff.
This will be the next topic to address
not sure yet if any of this works, because the
technicalities of dealing with variadic types are
quite different to our LISP-style typelist processing.
The good news is that with variadic templates it is
indeed possible, to supply dynamically picked arguments
to another function taking arbitrary arguments.
This all relies on the feature to unpack argument packs,
and, more specifically, about the possiblity to "wrap"
this unpacking around interspersed function call syntax
template<size_t...i>
Xyz
do_something(MyTuple myTuple)
{
return Xyz (std::get<i> (myTuple) ... );
}
Here the '...' will be applied to the i... and then
the whole std::get-construct will be wrapped around
each element. Mind bogging, but very powerful
next step will be to rig the mock element and set up
and cover the basic / generic element behaviour
This changeset
- adapts the (planned) unit test to the semantic of
the EventLog, which is now fully implemented
- adjusts the function names on the public Tangible interface,
to be better in line with the naming convention of the
corrsponding operations on the UI-Bus:
* "mark" operations are towards the UI element
* "note" messages are from the UI element towards some
state manager, which can be reached via the bus
what you see here now is just the tip of the icebearg...
If we follow this route, the Lumiera UI will become way more
elaborate and responsive than average desktop applications
initially my intention was to use the ID for equality test.
But on a second thought, this seemed like a bad idea, since
it confuses the concepts of equality and identity.
Note: at the moment, I do not know if we even need an equality test,
so it is provided here rather for sake of completeness. And this
means even more that we want an 'equality' implementation that
does what one would naively expect: compare the object identity
*and* compare the contents.
especially I've now decided how to handle const-ness:
We're open to all forms of const-ness, the actual usage decides.
const GenNode will only expose a const& to the data values
still TODO is the object builder notation for diff::Record
for the purpose of working out the inner logic, I frequently use the
help of a mindmap -- so why not commiting this alongside? For sure,
it is preliminary and the worked out concepts will be cast in code
and documented on the website. Yet the thought-process leading to
these decisions might be of some interest, at least for myself.
before engaging into the implementation of lib::Record,
I prefer to conduct a round of planning, to get a clearer
view about the requirements we'll meet when extending
our existing list diff to tree structures
Introduce the new term "Fork" at various relevant places
within the documentation. We do not entirely purge the
term "track" though; rather we
- make clear that "Fork" is the entity to build tracks
- use "fork" also synonymous to the "tree of tracks"
to carry out that rather obvious step, I was bound to consider
all the implications of choosing a given layout and handling pattern
for our external structure representation.
Finally, I settled upon the following decisions
- the value space represented within the DataCap is flat, not further structured
- the distinction between "attribute" and "nested object" is merely conceptual
and will be enforced solely by the diff detection / representation protocol
- basically, a nested subtree may appear as an attribute; the difference
between attributes and children lies solely in the way of access and referral:
by-name vs. positional
- it is pointless to save space for the representation of the discriminator ID
- but we can omit any further explicit type tag, because
- we do *not* support programming by switch-on-type, and thus
- we do *not* support full introspection, only a passive type-safety check
- this is *not* a limitation, since we acknowledge that GenNode is a *Monad*
- and the partial function needed within any flatMap implementation
maps naturally onto our Variant-Visitor; thus
- the DataCap can basically just *be* a Variant
- and GenNode has just to supply the neccessary shaffolding
to turn that into a full fledged Monad implementation, including
direct construction by wrapping a value and flatMap with tree walk
so yes, it is complicated, and inevitably involves three layers
of indirection. The alternative seems to bind the GUI direcly to
the Session interface -- is there a middle gound?
For the messages from GUI to Proc, we have our commands, based
on PlacementRef entities. But for feeding model updates to the
GUI, whatever I consider, I end up either with diff messages or
an synchronised access to Session attributes, which ties the
responsiveness of the GUI to the Builder operation.
- we use a GenNode element
- this holds a polymorphic value known as DataCap
- besides simple attribute values, this may hold collections of GenNode sub elements
- a special kind of GenNode collection, the Record, is used to represent objects
The purpose of this setup is to enable an external model representation
which is only loosely coupled to the interndal data representation
through the exchange of (tree)diff messages
previously this operation was named 'attach', which an be confused
with attching an object to this location. Indeed, the session interface
even offers such an attach function. By renaming the focus moving
operation into QueryFocus::shift(Scope), this ambiguity is resolved
This is the first step towards a generic backbone to connect
any GUI elements to the session within Proc-Layer.
It is based on a spefic understanding of Model-View-Controller,
which turns the Model-Controller interactions into messages.
Remove some orphaned diagrams and PNG images not actually used
in the TiddlyWiki. Add a page with some hints regarding Bouml
See also #960 -- Bouml has been discontinued and is closed source now
not sure how to proceed with this
This means to discontinue any research into emitting an optimal
diff verb sequence for now and just to document the possible path
I see to reach at such a optimal solution later, when it turns out
to be really necessary performance wise.
Personal note: I arrived at this conclusion while whatching the
New Year fireworks 2014/2015 at the banks of the Isar river in
the centre of the city.
Too sad that 2014 didn't bring us World War III
