Last night, Isaiah said: > It would be very helpful to know what people want it to do. > (Otherwise I'll be making something that everyone but me thinks is > useless)
While producing something useless isn't a complete waste of time if it helps the developer understand GNUstep development better, it doesn't help the project much. With this in mind, I thought I'd open up the discussion, and see what it is we actually want from Workflow. At the basic level, I think I want some kind of dataflow computing design tool. Something that allows me to construct a filter graph representing some kind of workflow. Simple workflows could be constructed using the existing action mechanism with a little extra metadata. Filter A could invoke an action in Filter B. B would then call-back to A to retrieve the passed objects. This would just require a mechanism for defining the selector that B should use (and A should respond to). This seems like a bit of a hack though. You really want a mechanism of 'pins,' where a source pin can be connected to a destination pin, the two can negotiate content types, and then the source can signal the destination that it has some data waiting. This could be implemented on top of the action mechanism using a well-defined protocol, if the source called the action, passing itself as the sender, and the recipient then used a call- back. This would limit us to a single 'out' pin per filter, however, which I think is limiting. The destination filter could be connected to the source in an outlet. This might work quite nicely, since the source could then check which out pin the callback caller was connected to. It could then proceed with the content type negotiation. If we re-use existing mechanisms, then the next question is how much of Gorm and StepTalk should be used. Gorm would allow workflow components to be connected, but the UI isn't ideal. Would it be better to replace Gorm, or add to it? My feeling is that we will still want to use Gorm and the StepTalk palette for creating Workflow filters, but we won't necessarily want to use it for building filter graphs (although we might want to use some of the Gorm code...) Ideas? Thoughts? Comments? Random insults? David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
