www.digitalmars.com         C & C++   DMDScript  

digitalmars.D.announce - Harmonia is dead?

reply MicroWizard <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> writes:
Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is on D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.

Does anybody know anything more about it ?

Thanks in advance,
Tamas Nagy
Feb 07 2006
parent reply "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
"MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is on 
 D
 links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.


And what is particularly "dead" there? :)


 Does anybody know anything more about it ?


I know that there are three projects now using it for
commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
verify.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com
Feb 07 2006
parent reply Hasan Aljudy <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> writes:
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 

Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is on 
D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.


 
 
 And what is particularly "dead" there? :)
 
 

Does anybody know anything more about it ?


 
 
 I know that there are three projects now using it for
 commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.
 
 I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
 as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
 E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
 verify.
 
 Andrew Fedoniouk.
 http://terrainformatica.com
 
 
 


I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, 
but that's about it!
It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
dead).

I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too 
much for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my 
attempts of playing with it.
Feb 07 2006
parent reply "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
"Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...


Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is 
on D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.



 And what is particularly "dead" there? :)



Does anybody know anything more about it ?



 I know that there are three projects now using it for
 commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

 I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
 as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
 E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
 verify.

 Andrew Fedoniouk.
 http://terrainformatica.com


 I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
 basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
 there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, but 
 that's about it!
 It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
 make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
 Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
 cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
 updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
 What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
 an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
 dead).

 I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too much 
 for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my attempts 
 of playing with it.


I am personally not using makefiles too.
There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++ 
project.
I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do something
seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
of what is going on there.

About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.

And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.

My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
starting at that moment. They would fuel development
and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.

If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
it well.

Trying to be objective as possible....
main benefits of Harmonia:

1) Harmonia uses modern sinking/bubbling event dispatching
schema which is *extremely* flexible and powerful.
It dramaticly reduces amount of code needed to build complex UI.
Remeber, GUI is all about events.
There are no toolkits around using such schema except of
browsers - it is standard mechanism in DHTML.
sinking/bubbling minimizes need of event subscription
(listeners, delegates) chains which is just good for GC based
systems.

2) It has HTML-like engine inside which is used
as universal resource format, layout manager, etc.
The engine is compact, fast and most
"non-greedy" from known to me and is implemented
in architecture best suitable for GC environments.

3) It is really simple, compact and portable.

4) It was designed to be scriptable too.
   HTML + scripting give non-comparable
   flexibility to complex applications.

5) It has BSD style license.

6) It is implemented in D from the very beginning and
   it has "D soul", ta-da!  :)

Main problems:
1) Documentation of course.
2) Lack of commercial project using it at the moment.
   It is my personal opinion but Open Source style of
   development without commercial interest - is just nothing.
   QT, AWT, SWT, Swing are all purely commercial projects.

But these are problems common to all toolkits I guess.

-----------------
In my honest and educated opinion
basic principles of Harmonia are just more powerful in their
simplicity then in QT and Swing (these two use the same
all-in-one approach)

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com
Feb 07 2006
next sibling parent reply =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jari-Matti_M=E4kel=E4?= <jmjmak utu.fi.invalid> writes:
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...


 Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is 
 on D
 links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.


 And what is particularly "dead" there? :)



 Does anybody know anything more about it ?


 I know that there are three projects now using it for
 commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

 I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
 as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
 E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
 verify.

 Andrew Fedoniouk.
 http://terrainformatica.com


 I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
 basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
 there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, but 
 that's about it!
 It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
 make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
 Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
 cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
 updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
 What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
 an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
 dead).

 I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too much 
 for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my attempts 
 of playing with it.


 
 I am personally not using makefiles too.
 There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
 It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++ 
 project.
 I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do something
 seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
 GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
 of what is going on there.
 
 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
 as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.
 
 And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
 or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
 and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.
 
 My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
 starting at that moment. They would fuel development
 and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
 gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
 couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.
 
 If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
 yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
 on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
 But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
 you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
 it well.
 
 Trying to be objective as possible....
 main benefits of Harmonia:
 
 1) Harmonia uses modern sinking/bubbling event dispatching
 schema which is *extremely* flexible and powerful.
 It dramaticly reduces amount of code needed to build complex UI.
 Remeber, GUI is all about events.
 There are no toolkits around using such schema except of
 browsers - it is standard mechanism in DHTML.
 sinking/bubbling minimizes need of event subscription
 (listeners, delegates) chains which is just good for GC based
 systems.
 
 2) It has HTML-like engine inside which is used
 as universal resource format, layout manager, etc.
 The engine is compact, fast and most
 "non-greedy" from known to me and is implemented
 in architecture best suitable for GC environments.
 
 3) It is really simple, compact and portable.
 
 4) It was designed to be scriptable too.
    HTML + scripting give non-comparable
    flexibility to complex applications.
 
 5) It has BSD style license.
 
 6) It is implemented in D from the very beginning and
    it has "D soul", ta-da!  :)
 
 Main problems:
 1) Documentation of course.
 2) Lack of commercial project using it at the moment.
    It is my personal opinion but Open Source style of
    development without commercial interest - is just nothing.
    QT, AWT, SWT, Swing are all purely commercial projects.
 
 But these are problems common to all toolkits I guess.
 
 -----------------
 In my honest and educated opinion
 basic principles of Harmonia are just more powerful in their
 simplicity then in QT and Swing (these two use the same
 all-in-one approach)


Sounds very interesting. I didn't know Harmonia had a BSD style license.
Is it really possible to use this GUI without any proprietary libraries
by terrainformatica?

How does this sinking/bubbling differ from signals/slots used in QT? I
would like to help porting this to Linux, but unfortunately my knowledge
on low level graphics on X is very little. Maybe some help with the docs?

The sample programs run quite well using the latest wine, but there are
some problems: dialog.ask messes up with the buttons and scrolling the
html page containers is a bit slow.


Jari-Matti
Feb 08 2006
parent "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
"Jari-Matti Mäkelä" <jmjmak utu.fi.invalid> wrote in message 
news:dscj38$19m5$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message
 news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message
 news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...


 Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it 
 is
 on D
 links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.


 And what is particularly "dead" there? :)



 Does anybody know anything more about it ?


 I know that there are three projects now using it for
 commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

 I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
 as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
 E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more 
 to
 verify.

 Andrew Fedoniouk.
 http://terrainformatica.com


 I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
 basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but
 there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, 
 but
 that's about it!
 It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon,
 make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
 Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who
 cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No
 updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
 What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's
 an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly
 dead).

 I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too 
 much
 for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my 
 attempts
 of playing with it.


 I am personally not using makefiles too.
 There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
 It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++
 project.
 I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do 
 something
 seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
 GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
 of what is going on there.

 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
 as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.

 And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
 or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
 and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.

 My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
 starting at that moment. They would fuel development
 and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
 gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
 couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.

 If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
 yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
 on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
 But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
 you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
 it well.

 Trying to be objective as possible....
 main benefits of Harmonia:

 1) Harmonia uses modern sinking/bubbling event dispatching
 schema which is *extremely* flexible and powerful.
 It dramaticly reduces amount of code needed to build complex UI.
 Remeber, GUI is all about events.
 There are no toolkits around using such schema except of
 browsers - it is standard mechanism in DHTML.
 sinking/bubbling minimizes need of event subscription
 (listeners, delegates) chains which is just good for GC based
 systems.

 2) It has HTML-like engine inside which is used
 as universal resource format, layout manager, etc.
 The engine is compact, fast and most
 "non-greedy" from known to me and is implemented
 in architecture best suitable for GC environments.

 3) It is really simple, compact and portable.

 4) It was designed to be scriptable too.
    HTML + scripting give non-comparable
    flexibility to complex applications.

 5) It has BSD style license.

 6) It is implemented in D from the very beginning and
    it has "D soul", ta-da!  :)

 Main problems:
 1) Documentation of course.
 2) Lack of commercial project using it at the moment.
    It is my personal opinion but Open Source style of
    development without commercial interest - is just nothing.
    QT, AWT, SWT, Swing are all purely commercial projects.

 But these are problems common to all toolkits I guess.

 -----------------
 In my honest and educated opinion
 basic principles of Harmonia are just more powerful in their
 simplicity then in QT and Swing (these two use the same
 all-in-one approach)


 Sounds very interesting. I didn't know Harmonia had a BSD style license.
 Is it really possible to use this GUI without any proprietary libraries
 by terrainformatica?


Harmonia does not require any external libraries.
Only one: There is only C imageio staticly linked library which includes
libjpeg and libpng/zlib and it would be good if you will include
your appreciation to their authors in about box of your application.


 How does this sinking/bubbling differ from signals/slots used in QT? I
 would like to help porting this to Linux, but unfortunately my knowledge
 on low level graphics on X is very little. Maybe some help with the docs?


Porting:
http://www.terrainformatica.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Harmonia.Porting

sinking/bubbling:
General principle explained here:
http://catcode.com/domcontent/events/capture.html

I am going to explain this with more details but so far:

Container widget (e.g. some Window) receives all
events targeted to its children and twice:
before child processing - sinking phase and
after child processing (if event was not consumed by child)

To be short: for "primordial" events like mouse/keyboard/focus
events you don't need signal/slots at all. For logical/secondary events
D delegates works extremely well and they are sufficient.


 The sample programs run quite well using the latest wine, but there are
 some problems: dialog.ask messes up with the buttons and scrolling the
 html page containers is a bit slow.


Didn't test it in Wine to be honest. Will take a look.

Andrew.


 Jari-Matti
Feb 08 2006
prev sibling parent reply Hasan Aljudy <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> writes:
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:


"MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...



Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is 
on D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.



And what is particularly "dead" there? :)




Does anybody know anything more about it ?



I know that there are three projects now using it for
commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
verify.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, but 
that's about it!
It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
dead).

I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too much 
for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my attempts 
of playing with it.


 
 
 I am personally not using makefiles too.
 There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
 It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++ 
 project.


OK, from the page:
<quote>
A smile.dsw file is provided there. It allows one to build and debug 
Harmonia and samples in MS VS 6 environment. ( It assumes that D 
compiler and tools located in c:/dmd and c:/dm folders respectively )
</quote>
how can I fix the path assumptions?
I have it in E:\dmd\dmd and E:\dmd\dm
I tried "search and replace in files" in VS, but didn't seem to work.



 I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do something
 seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
 GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
 of what is going on there.


I used to have VS6, later I switched to 2003, now 2005!
I'm familiar with debuggers, and I know how important they are .. but 
tell that to Walter!!


 
 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
 as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write something 
once I wrap my head around it.


 
 And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
 or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
 and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.


You mean this:
http://www.terrainformatica.com/forum/main.whtm
?



 
 My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
 starting at that moment. They would fuel development
 and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
 gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
 couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.


That sheds some light ...
Maybe you can tell us why C++ was favoured over D?


 
 If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
 yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
 on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
 But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
 you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
 it well.


<snip>

Greate! Where do you prefer I ask my questions?
Feb 08 2006
parent reply "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
"Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:dsdbik$1vqi$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...


Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:


"MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...



Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is 
on D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.



And what is particularly "dead" there? :)




Does anybody know anything more about it ?



I know that there are three projects now using it for
commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
verify.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, 
but that's about it!
It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
dead).

I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too 
much for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my 
attempts of playing with it.



 I am personally not using makefiles too.
 There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
 It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++ 
 project.


 OK, from the page:
 <quote>
 A smile.dsw file is provided there. It allows one to build and debug 
 Harmonia and samples in MS VS 6 environment. ( It assumes that D compiler 
 and tools located in c:/dmd and c:/dm folders respectively )
 </quote>
 how can I fix the path assumptions?
 I have it in E:\dmd\dmd and E:\dmd\dm
 I tried "search and replace in files" in VS, but didn't seem to work.


Open smile.dsp file in text editor and do search and
replace on c:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe to e:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe
You also need to do this for all other dsp files e.g. in
/samples/hello1.dsp


 I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do 
 something
 seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
 GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
 of what is going on there.


 I used to have VS6, later I switched to 2003, now 2005!
 I'm familiar with debuggers, and I know how important they are .. but tell 
 that to Walter!!


I am personally fine with current situation with debugging as soon as I can
debug D in VS6. Not perfect but works most of the time.


 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
 as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


 My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write something once 
 I wrap my head around it.


Thanks in advance!


 And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
 or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
 and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.


 You mean this:
 http://www.terrainformatica.com/forum/main.whtm
 ?


Yes. But I think that it is better to ask Walter to create
.gui news group.  As there are many GUI projects -
and many people will benefit from having such single place.
Many tasks are common.


 My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
 starting at that moment. They would fuel development
 and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
 gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
 couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.


 That sheds some light ...
 Maybe you can tell us why C++ was favoured over D?


This horse was beatten to death but anyway
lack of "const/readonly" was the biggest.
It is just too hard for 10 people spreading all over the globe
to work without it.

As a consequence of lack of readonly is absence of string in D.
There are very convenient arrays but wchar[] is not a string.
String is an immutable char[]/wchar[].

It would be possible for us to use char[] as a string even without
readonly if we would have opAssign in structures - so we
will be able to create readonly envelope around char[].

Ideally string will be just const char[] with set of outer methods.

const is not only about strings - it helps in many other places
despite of the the fact that const in C++ is not a physical immutability.
It is intentional immutability and this is sufficient enough.


 If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
 yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
 on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
 But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
 you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
 it well.


 <snip>

 Greate! Where do you prefer I ask my questions?


I think the best place is news.digitalmars.com/gui if it will appear.
D community is simply not in the position when it may allow to
spread discussions on multiple sites.

Andrew.
Feb 08 2006
next sibling parent reply MicroWizard <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> writes:
Thank you all for the answers and thoughts.


year. Nothing finished. Promises only. Crap. So I want to avoid VS with every
possible effort.)

When I wrote 'almost dead', I only wanted to compile anything on my own machine.
It is not possible yet (without acting as a developer of Harmonia :-)
Not a real problem, but delays the the start of commercial projects.

Now, when DWT seems to be THE possible D GUI, it would be very-very useful to
have a real alternative. I think/hope DWT is good. And I also think that
Harmonia could be good. But it needs terrible much effort to compare them.

Please create some documentation to Harmonia (perhaps DDOC would shorten the
work progress) and I promise that I will try it and try to use it for smaller
projects. Maybe other people will do the same.

And please make an automated command line base 'compile solution' to make
possible for everyone to compile/run/try the demo. It must be very easy to do
it. A single ZIP file with embedded directory structure and a START.BAT file
will work for almost everyone.

And again. I'm very happy to see that the project developers does not think to
abandone Harmonia. I'm looing forward to hear the good news!

Tamás Nagy
Hungary
tamas_AT_microwizard_DOT_hu

In article <dsdejd$21u7$1 digitaldaemon.com>, Andrew Fedoniouk says...

"Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:dsdbik$1vqi$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com> wrote in message 
 news:dsbo8s$ird$1 digitaldaemon.com...


Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:


"MicroWizard" <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> wrote in message 
news:dsba8t$78f$1 digitaldaemon.com...



Since D GUI framework is a new/old issue I have checked Harmonia (it is 
on D
links page) and found it interesting ... and almost dead.



And what is particularly "dead" there? :)




Does anybody know anything more about it ?



I know that there are three projects now using it for
commercial projects. But have no idea what their status is now.

I suspect that people are waiting for "D, feature complete" state
as it's hard sometime to port from one D build to another.
E.g. inner classes introduction in D took three hours to fix and more to 
verify.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


I said this in another post, but I guess it would be more relevant here,
basically, I too looked at Harmonia and found it very interesting, but 
there simply isn't any documentation! Well, there is a class hirarchy, 
but that's about it!
It also doesn't work with the build tool, it needs make files!! C'mon, 
make files are so old-school, no one should use them with D.
Finally, it seems abandoned!! There's no forum, no sign of anyone who 
cares about it, no sign of any kind of community/users/whatever. No 
updates seem to be ever made to the page? or the project itself?
What do you call that? I call it "almost dead"! (The reason that there's 
an "almost" is because it seems in a usable state, so it's not completly 
dead).

I tried to play with it, but the makefile nonsense complicated it too 
much for me. Plus the no-documentation issue. I had no success with my 
attempts of playing with it.



 I am personally not using makefiles too.
 There is a smile.dsw - workspace file for Microsoft Visual Studio 6.
 It allows to edit source, compile and run it in debuger - almost as C++ 
 project.


 OK, from the page:
 <quote>
 A smile.dsw file is provided there. It allows one to build and debug 
 Harmonia and samples in MS VS 6 environment. ( It assumes that D compiler 
 and tools located in c:/dmd and c:/dm folders respectively )
 </quote>
 how can I fix the path assumptions?
 I have it in E:\dmd\dmd and E:\dmd\dm
 I tried "search and replace in files" in VS, but didn't seem to work.


Open smile.dsp file in text editor and do search and
replace on c:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe to e:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe
You also need to do this for all other dsp files e.g. in
/samples/hello1.dsp


 I would recommend you to grab VS from somewhere if you want to do 
 something
 seriously in D and GUI - it is a bit difficult to develop event driven
 GUI without debugger. And also debugger will help you to understand
 of what is going on there.


 I used to have VS6, later I switched to 2003, now 2005!
 I'm familiar with debuggers, and I know how important they are .. but tell 
 that to Walter!!


I am personally fine with current situation with debugging as soon as I can
debug D in VS6. Not perfect but works most of the time.


 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English
 as you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


 My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write something once 
 I wrap my head around it.


Thanks in advance!


 And there is a forum on terrainformatica.com - you may ask there
 or here. I am trying to read all topics with "GUI", "const"
 and "outer methods" :) in subject lines.


 You mean this:
 http://www.terrainformatica.com/forum/main.whtm
 ?


Yes. But I think that it is better to ask Walter to create
.gui news group.  As there are many GUI projects -
and many people will benefit from having such single place.
Many tasks are common.


 My plan was to use Harmonia in real projects we were
 starting at that moment. They would fuel development
 and documentation too. But as I said before these projects
 gone for C++. Projects were for 10 developers teams and
 couple of D issues overweighted C++ pan.


 That sheds some light ...
 Maybe you can tell us why C++ was favoured over D?


This horse was beatten to death but anyway
lack of "const/readonly" was the biggest.
It is just too hard for 10 people spreading all over the globe
to work without it.

As a consequence of lack of readonly is absence of string in D.
There are very convenient arrays but wchar[] is not a string.
String is an immutable char[]/wchar[].

It would be possible for us to use char[] as a string even without
readonly if we would have opAssign in structures - so we
will be able to create readonly envelope around char[].

Ideally string will be just const char[] with set of outer methods.

const is not only about strings - it helps in many other places
despite of the the fact that const in C++ is not a physical immutability.
It is intentional immutability and this is sufficient enough.


 If you mean "almost dead" as a status of development then
 yes - its is not moving at the moment. Personally I am focused
 on HTMLayout which is sister-ship of Harmonia.
 But if someone will start new project in Harmonia
 you may rely on help of myself and three more guys who know
 it well.


 <snip>

 Greate! Where do you prefer I ask my questions?


I think the best place is news.digitalmars.com/gui if it will appear.
D community is simply not in the position when it may allow to
spread discussions on multiple sites.

Andrew.
Feb 09 2006
parent reply "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
 And please make an automated command line base 'compile solution' to make
 possible for everyone to compile/run/try the demo. It must be very easy to 
 do
 it. A single ZIP file with embedded directory structure and a START.BAT 
 file
 will work for almost everyone.


%harmonia%/build.bat
just in the root of the package.
will build harmonia and all samples and start them :)

http://www.terrainformatica.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Harmonia.Build

change line
DC      = c:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe
in release.mak if you have dmd installed in different place.


Best regards,

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com
Feb 09 2006
parent MicroWizard <MicroWizard_member pathlink.com> writes:
Ok. I have tried it. And it works mostly.

Only to mention:
-I had to install and be familiar with SVN (I really like it but ZIP is more
popular method to distribute packages)
-Did not compile first
-I had to find out reading 'makefile' that 'harmonia/ui/native/wintheme.d'
has to be renamed to 'winxptheme.d'
-Testbed can't find HTMLEffectsTest.htm
-Browser's and testbed's HTML engine is promising but not too useful yet.
Complains at any <BR>s and <TD>s.

These are only small inconveniences. Great work. Hope to see more features.
I will try to build something practical ;-)

Best whishes,
Tamas Nagy


 A single ZIP file with embedded directory structure and a START.BAT 
 file will work for almost everyone.


%harmonia%/build.bat
just in the root of the package.
will build harmonia and all samples and start them :)

http://www.terrainformatica.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Harmonia.Build

change line
DC      = c:\dmd\bin\dmd.exe
in release.mak if you have dmd installed in different place.


Best regards,

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com
Feb 10 2006
prev sibling parent reply Georg Wrede <georg.wrede nospam.org> writes:
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com>

 Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

 "Hasan Aljudy" <hasan.aljudy gmail.com>







 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English as
 you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


 
 My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write
 something once I wrap my head around it.


 
 Thanks in advance!


You could also write documentation in the code, _in terrible english_, 
and let everyone else change that to "nice english".

That would be fast, productive, and if anybody doesn't understand 
something, they can ask here.
Feb 14 2006
parent reply "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news terrainformatica.com> writes:
 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English as
 you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


 My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write
 something once I wrap my head around it.


 Thanks in advance!


 You could also write documentation in the code, _in terrible english_, and 
 let everyone else change that to "nice english".

 That would be fast, productive, and if anybody doesn't understand 
 something, they can ask here.


At the moment of writing it was not such tool as ddoc.
I will write comments as soon as I can.

Andrew.
Feb 14 2006
parent Dannerbeck Dieter <no.spam.dd gmx.de> writes:
Andrew Fedoniouk schrieb:

 About documentation: I am personaly too bad in written English as
 you may see. I would appreciate for any help here.


 My english isn't perfect either .. but I'd be glad to write
 something once I wrap my head around it.


 Thanks in advance!


 You could also write documentation in the code, _in terrible english_, and 
 let everyone else change that to "nice english".

 That would be fast, productive, and if anybody doesn't understand 
 something, they can ask here.


 
 At the moment of writing it was not such tool as ddoc.
 I will write comments as soon as I can.
 
 Andrew. 
 
 


Good:) I would translate all stuff to german! Maybe on 
http://sprungmarke.net or on the Harmonia Wiki if a.) I get access;) b.) 
If the wiki gets multilingual.

I hope I see fast Progress.

Dieter
Feb 17 2006