[Chandler-dev] Framing discussion about desktop architecture

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:34 AM 9/13/2007 -0700, D John Anderson wrote:

>On Sep 12, 2007, at 9:27 PM, Reid Ellis wrote:
>>When I try to trace UI creation, I hit something of a wall. Where I
>>would expect code to go into an __init() and proceed normally,
>>there is a large wall of abstraction with "template" methods and
>>schema attributes for what should be simple member variables.
>>Although I can appreciate what this high-level abstraction does,
>>and why it is there, this has to be weighed against the burden put
>>upon developers who have to go through this learning curve. I still
>>don't think I've finished it myself.
>>
>>I don't think the complexity of instantiation is worth the modicum
>>of increased functionality it affords. (Oooh, I almost said
>>"affordance").
>
>+1. I also get really confused by the template brick wall and I'd
>love to get rid of it. I think we can simplify it pretty easily
>without sacrificing the reason it was created -- i.e. to make code
>for item creation less verbose.

I'm also good with getting rid of it.  The original reason for it 
being created was just to show that we didn't need an XML syntax for 
specifying UI, that it was possible to do something like that in Python.

But by the time we were using it everywhere, the main schema API had 
improved enough not to need the template syntax any more.  I 
suggested removing it then, but there were other things considered 
higher priority at the time.