thinForm - clunky to use, but a form designer none the less :)

[SteveOW]

I really don't understand people who need any sort of Visual designer for programming GUI
programs.Probably i am not used to that way of programming.
And i doubt that this way speed up any kind of programming task.
Probably do when you have lot of controls in one window(dialog).

Aurel,

Thanks for your feedback.

I think I know what you mean. When I first tried to learn visual programming in early 1980's (on VAX/VMS/FMS and DEC Windows/X Windows) I found form designing very confusing and a big slow-down on my production rate. Even now with my old bloated VB project I am often not sure where all the different bits of code are floating around. Some bits are hiding in buttons, some in forms, some in the main program. For me one of many nice things about beginning to learn thinBasic is to find nice, individual, compact, self-contained scripts. And each script contains all the script-specific logic in one place. Which is great.

At the same time I agree with Chris and Petr about some benefits of an effective Form Designer/GUI Designer/UI Designer. I guess that having one could help to attract more programmers to using thinBasic. When I worked with end-users I also found that involving them in form design using a visual drag and drop tool helps to increase their commitment to an application. Even if they just choose the color of the buttons. This is especially true of users in HR and Marketing and PR departments!

But does thinBasic "need" a visual UI designer? I am reading that Eros puts passion before profit; the results of the community are often beautiful (IMO). Maybe attracting large numbers of new users is not the aim of the game. For me the best restaurants to eat in, and work in, are those which do not wish to become like MacDonalds.

For me (as a programmer) Petr's Visual UI Designer is good because...
1) It lets me see at a glance what kinds of control are AVAILABLE that I might use
2) It lets me quickly produce a Visual Form and an associated Dialog script skeleton without having to browse through documentation about structures, methods and parameters.
3) (IMO, from review of forum history) Petr seems to be always making newer and better things. I think perhaps that he is robot-assisted.

This is getting too long. So I will stop.

[SteveOW]

I have not used this, but have read good things about it for linux.


http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

Kryton,

Thanks. Yes I saw Gambas on Wikipedia and keep coming back to it.

My VB legacy has so far kept me chained to windows. From technical angle I am rather shy of Unix in general and of Linux in particular. I dont want to be a system manager. I cant justify the cost (in mental effort and physical logistics) of running two operating systems at once. I occasionally work offshore and am weight restricted to one small laptop. I am reluctant to gather all my bags and make an all or nothing jump from windows to linux.

It would be nice to have a low-cost, low-risk bridge into the Linux/Open Systems world so that I can migrate piecemeal in small chunks and revert if things get messy on the other side. The bridge would involve hardware, OS, officeware, application dev and run environments.

A web-browser/java route would seem possible except for my legacy basic programs and need for high-powered data crunching. Maybe theres some way of using cloud-based processing power at low rental cost. But then that would not be available offshore.

Hmmm.

[Aurel]

No ,it's not long if is interesting to read.Your observation is very good & OK.

[SteveOW]

Kryton

P.S. I just reread this thread from beginning and see that you were the originator of the thinForm.
I apologise for having not honoured you accordingly.

[Petr Schreiber]

Yes, Kent (Kryton9) is the thinForm author - I just did minor help and updated the code to reflect some advancements in ThinBASIC syntax over the years (switch from CPU intensive GUI message processing to CALLBACK mechanism, described in ThinBASIC Journal #2)

Petr seems to be always making newer and better things. I think perhaps that he is robot-assisted.

Thanks for your kind words. Regarding the robot-assisted... yes I am, please see here


Petr

[SteveOW]

Eros,

thanks for your kind words on my first post.

I did not realize till just now that thinBasic executable was a bundle and not a compilation.
Now I understand better how PowerBasic and Oxygen fit into the picture.
For my needs this is not a problem.

I begin to understand the architecture of having a nice easy-to-code thinBasic as a kind of "orchestra conductor" between the user interface and the high-performance pre-compiled engine (oxygen or other special DLL). It reminds me of the client-server model.

Now I am thinking about how to speed up an event-driven simulation.
Maybe I can decouple the front-end user interface from the back-end simulator engine by running as separate processes. E.g. I can fire up two separate thinBasic scripts at the same time?
Is there presently any suitable way of asynchronous communication between seperate thinBasic processes?

(P.S. This post is drifting away from the topic of the Visual User Interface thread.
Please can you advise how do I move it to another thread?)

[kryton9]

Kryton

P.S. I just reread this thread from beginning and see that you were the originator of the thinForm.
I apologise for having not honoured you accordingly.

Thanks, it was my first major app to learn thinBasic. I got lots of help from Eros and Petr. It also showed the beauty of thinBasic that a newbie could take on something like that.

Petr took my wood wheeled cart and made it an automobile. The current version that he made is all his talent and in using the new control handling system that Eros put into place.

I am glad you will be giving thinBasic a try. Your projects sound like they will be very interesting to follow in the coming future.

[ErosOlmi]

Is there presently any suitable way of asynchronous communication between seperate thinBasic processes?

(P.S. This post is drifting away from the topic of the Visual User Interface thread.
Please can you advise how do I move it to another thread?)

Yes, it is better to open new posts.


One way to communicate between process can be using Tcp/Udp module.
Some examples can be found into http://www.thinbasic.com/community/f...Tcp-Udp-module
In particular: http://www.thinbasic.com/community/s...ode-Networking

Here another way: Memory Mapped Files: http://www.thinbasic.com/community/s...y-Mapped-File)

Some Microsoft advice: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

[SteveOW]

Thanks Eros.

Thats "Right on the Nail"
Those links are exactly what I needed.
IPC (Inter Process Communication) is the keyword.
I will study the thinBasic examples and do some thinking.