Team

I am intrigued about the "Freelin" framework that was mentioned in this thread: Amiga(oid)Community / Suggestion - Common API Dev team

Unfortunately the conversation moved on and discussion on Freelin was lost in amongst the other (still very interesting) chatter.

I though creating a dedicated "Freelin" thread was worthwhile so that it can regain some focus.

Regards
Darren

Last edited by newbee on 04-Mar-2010 at 01:20 AM.

@team

Here are some links to information about Freelin


http://www.feelin.fr/
http://utilitybase.com/forum/index.php?action=vtopic&forum=202

Darren

@team

This sounds really promising:

Freeling development re-started

Quote:

Actually, development went on until 2007. Gofromiel (the author) is now working on another project. However, since several people are talking about Feelin here, I would like to announce that development resumed a few months ago . For now I won't commit in anything, just say that like you I was ####ed off to lose this good work. Stay tuned...

@newbee

Won't *really* promise anything as I've got much on my plate, but I've got an idea for a little experiment involving Feelin, Spidermonkey and combined XML for GUI and code like with Flex.... Maybe this weekend :)

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Are there any current programs that have been coded with Feelin'?

Would be nice to see it in action...


It definitely looks interesting..

And one more, it would definitely be great to have a more detailed tutorial on the XML GUI building capabilities. The "Hello World"-example on the Feeling-site doesn't really explain anything regarding XML.

Last edited by steril606 on 04-Mar-2010 at 08:05 AM.

I'll try to do something if I can find some time...

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@vidarh & Everyone (So much interest so quickly)

My goodness... tangible product development!!!!!

WOW

Thanks for anything you have time to do...

It's so cool to see acorns growing into oaks right before your eyes...

Last edited by newbee on 04-Mar-2010 at 08:55 AM.

@steril606

It's worse than that in terms of docs - there are a lot of classes that just aren't documented at all. On the good side, that means there's a lot more functionality there than you'd think from just looking at the docs :) I think there's something like 20 classes that's not covered by the docs.

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@newbee

I wouldn't call it "product development" just yet :) We'll see what I can get time for this weekend... For now I'd mainly see it as an experiment - steril606's mention of Flex inspired me and reminded me of a (long dead) Linux project called entity which was more or less like Feelin + javascript.

There's no way I'll get time for anything remotely complete, but I hope I'll get time for a proof of concept that'll expose a small part of the Feelin API to Spidermonkey, then we'll see if it can be made useful enough to be worth it.

For now I'm limited to AROS and classic as I don't have a PPC box yet, but I may attempt a cross compile for OS4 too.

I'm still not sure whether Feelin or NTUI will be the best alternative going forward - NTUI has the big advantage of a dedicated developer, and seems like it may be more comprehensive... But on the other hand Feelin is available now.

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Wiki for new/returning Amiga users - Projects: ACE basic compiler / FrexxEd / Git

@newbee

Meh. Couldn't resist having a go. First problem with Feelin: The build system is non-standard and especially not suited for cross compiles from the looks of it. Don't think that'll be a major obstacle but it needs to be sorted out.

EDIT: As it turns out Icaros comes with a working Feelin installation, including a link lib, feelin.library and headers, so I'll be able to play with it that way. Still need to figure out the build system though - the newest published snapshot of the source even appears to be missing some files (though I might be missing something...)

EDIT: I have a near functioning SpiderMonkey build for AROS (based on an old / outdated Amiga port from Aminet, but it should have the functionality needed for my experiment)

Last edited by vidarh on 04-Mar-2010 at 11:32 AM.
Last edited by vidarh on 04-Mar-2010 at 11:05 AM.

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@vidarh

Looking forward to whatever you may find out..

@Thread

The last time I looked at Feelin' it lacked a tree-structure gadget (as in directory trees). I hope that can be arranged.

Looking forward to whatever comes of this, like the ideas behind Feelin, hopefully centaurz helps it to be moved out of unmaintained, and hope vidarh has success with his experiments. Keep us informed.

Last edited by HenryCase on 05-Mar-2010 at 08:55 PM.

@HenryCase

I'm beginning to lean towards NTUI, but we'll see.. I'm also curious to see what centaurz has done with it.

Haven't had time to get something running with it yet this weekend, but I *have* gotten SpiderMonkey 1.8 to build under AROS almost entirely out of the box - the build is very clean (using the standard Mozilla project makefile, and just a couple of #ifdef's, courtesy of changes from the older OS4 port on Aminet - overall the AROS port required fewer changes than many of the other ports they have). I intend to package it up and put it on Aminet / os-exec later in case it's usable for anyone else..

I may even look at turning it into "spidermonkey.library" later (for now it's a linklib and a standalone js shell). Note that this version will still be far slower than the newer Firefox versions, since they use JIT, while this version is purely interpreted.

Anyway, getting Spidermonkey running is the first step - the next step of my experiment will be to try to hook up a "script" tag like in HTML into Feelin's XML syntax, and allow that to be used to define event handlers.

EDIT: The patch to get Spidermonkey to build under AROS ended up at just 74 lines, about 40 lines changed, most of them trivial.. OS4 port would likely be almost as simple. Classic I'm not sure about yet. Did run into some minor build problems but they were easy to work around.

Last edited by vidarh on 06-Mar-2010 at 08:37 PM.

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@vidarh

By the way, you know there is also a LUA binding on aros called zulu (made by Matthias Rustler) that makes possible to build MUI simple applications using lua; maybe a similar LUA binding (and one that does support callback hooks unlike the actual zulu) might be possible even for feelin...

Saimon69

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@thread

Looking at various XML examples for Feelin now, I can't help but think that the XML used is fairly ugly. The notification, in particular, is pretty bizarre through very flexible.

There's a lot of smaller warts (like capitalizing tags) a few larger ones (using "name" attribute instead of "id", or without specifying a DTD that defines name as an XML id) and a few pretty major ones (failure to specify the encoding used, while actually using ISO-latin-1 - that means a conforming XML parser will reject a lot of the files; specifying notifications by using tags given names specified in the "name" attributes elsewhere in the file - this makes it impossible to reasonably validate the file using a generic XML parser).

Personally at least, I'd want to fix those problems before seriously considering Feelin, as it throws a lot of the benefits of using XML as the file format out of the window for no good reason.

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@vidarh

Thanks for the effort of looking into Feelin, maybe you should try get the latest version to see any significant changes ?

Here are some Glade XML examples :
http://people.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/apb.html

Last edited by asymetrix on 07-Mar-2010 at 01:18 AM.

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@asymetrix

The one I've looked at is the latest published version. It's not bad, but as mentioned there are definitively some things that ought to be fixed if it's to be more widely used

Regarding Glade, I've used it before. It's ok, but I think the problem with "mixing and matching" like that for tools is that the structure depends a lot on the layout methods supported by the toolkit, and I'm not sure it's a good match - you'd easily end up with a very different looking GUI than the one you think you're designing.

Also, Glade XML is extremely verbose compared to what's needed - ignoring the few deficiencies, I much prefer the Feelin XML...

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@vidarh

Any suggestions for the XML (in NTUI)?
(This should be in the NTUI thread, but the XML discussion went on here...)

The XML is not really well formatted probably because of leak of knoweldge of the author.
I am not an XML hero either, but I want to make it "right".

I plan it straight forward, the tag name is always the widget name, every widget has a set of common attributes that may be set but dont have to. There are also additional attributes for most of the widgets. The attributes in XML should correspond 1:! witht he attributes you set programmatically.

e.g.

<window id="myWin">
  <button id="myButton" text="ClickMe!" help="This is a demo button." notify="NotifyClick"/>
</window>

Does that look ok to you guys?

Programatically, that would correspond to something like this:

ntui_BeginWindow("myWindow");
ntui_Button("myButton","ClickMe!","NotifyClick");
ntui_SetAttrByID("myButton",TUIA_HELP,"This is a demo button.");
ntui_EndWindow();


Of course, the help text doenst need to be set like this, I just demonstated how attrbiutes are set if they are not part of the widget constructor.

Last edited by Wanderer on 07-Mar-2010 at 12:41 PM.

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