On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Herman Bruyninckx wrote:
> I'm following the Dia mailinglist for some time already; I've looked at the
> code itself too. And this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable with Dia on the
> following points:
>
> - I have the very strong impression that Dia is completely linked with GTK.
> Not that I don't like GTK, but wouldn't it be better/possible to separate
> the functionality from the display? So that Dia could be used as a library
> in other open source projects.
Dia is a graphical program. There is no way around it. It needs a GUI
toolkit. What parts are there you want "separated"?
> - What is the vision of the Dia developers on the open standard Modelica
> modelling language (www.modelica.org)? Modelica is a modeling language
> to describe physical systems. Supporting it in Dia wouldn't be too
> difficult, I guess, and make Dia useful in a large community.
Actually i know some Modelica.
Modelica, like UML can be used to desribe Models of systems, be it
electrical circuits or pneumatic systems. This is *not* what Dia does, Dia
draws pretty graphics, and so I've told everyone that thinks it's easy to
tranform Dia into a full UML program.
It is not easy, Dia contains none of the structure that such a model
contains, it describes a graphical diagram, and only that. Extending it to
encompass a specific structural model (be it UML, modelica or whatever)
will take a lot of work and will result in a program structured
quite different from Dia, so different in fact, that i think it would be
easier to just start from scratch.
/ Alex
