As a novice to both Rev. and certainly TAOO (but not SQL, data modeling
or RADs) perhaps it may be useful for me to take the data modeler's
equivalent of an advanced "Hello World" and work with you to produce a
tutorial that shows the complete process of developing a "Name, Address,
Phone Number" application using TAOO. As we all know, tracking and
formatting names and addresses can be tricky if you want to be as
flexible as possible. Considering internationalization, households with
couples that don't have the same last name with children with different
last names, etc.
This sound like a perfect job for a TAOO template. A name template, an
address template and a phone number template and a group of these with
"automatic relationships" when you plop them together. A business
address is more complex that a residence one. What if you want both type
in the same stack? How would you create a "name" line for an envelope
that was going to a particular person at an address as opposed to a
communication that was intended for a couple that resided at that
address? Once more, how would you create the salutation for a
personalized letter inside for each situation?
Once you had all of this figured out and placed in templates I would
think that one would only need to copy the template into the app and
perhaps adjust some "configuration" variables and, "Ta DA!" in mere
moments, that part of a custom app is done. Is this what you mean Mister X?
Dave
MisterX wrote:
Dan,
you're clear that im complex and frustrated. and you're right!
sorry for being so revolutionary... but im not really...
most people grow up with legos, I discovered Fisher Tecknics
and didn't even try the other sets because FT's did it all
before Legos did more than just houses...
In HyperCard I built Duplos, then legos than FTs...
TAOO is an art of manipulating objects...
And it's not about navigation alone.
And this I don't make clearer for the reader as you point out!
consider user + computer
computer = applications + data
user = need + information
now, we need a reactive system, RunTime Revolution!
computer can help user get to data, edit it and send or store it away for
future benefits...
In this system we have all the rev "objects", stacks, cards, fields, lines,
columns, etc...
We all have needs for these... business or informational or for
administration of thousands of things...
we don't have columns in rev but we abstract them with items...
so here's where it's different...
TAOO is the same, I or you can abstract a list of "objects" as "groups".
Forget the group keyword in rev for the moment
So a storage or list or catalog or book or index of objects is easily
represented by a group.
It's easy to see that you can manage a group of objects regardless of their
type.
Any object can be manipulated in its own way in a wide varieted of ways
whether in single or grouped form. This is a matter of grouping the
varieties
Rule of TAOO: if you create a function of one object, create equally the one
that does many...
But these ways of using objects are not intuitive in GUIs.
hence someone along the line make the "explorer type of interface".
Once which adapts to anything...
They (the guis) are a universe of groups of objects. These groups are
objects in groups too... you see the space now I see...
Now each object (or group) has a verb. Or rather the user needs to do this
to this object(s)... like delete contact or create contact. contact could be
a company or a car in the inventory.
Our object is a company, a product or a client... The groups are evident.
(in rev, these could be database records or cards in a stack with the
appropriate fields or custom prop arrays or text files, xml, etc...).
What you don't see is that the underlying GUI, the running scripts use
"contact" (to name one object) as a keyword... It's not hard to make a
contacts stack and gui... true...
but now your business is trading... you need suppliers and buyer contacts to
be differentiated...
To taoo this is the same "gui"... copy paste... done... no programming
involved... Is that OOP reuse or what? Navigation GUI goes without saying...
So the key and what I battle against today is the pletoria of information
storage types... Doing one by one is necessary but how to do you make one
GUI work with all without changing the GUI each time you update your DB API
or storage source?
That's where TAOO gets interesting because of it's hierarchy of events...
OS->IDE->TAOO->application
or TAOO->Master->[Manager->][Agent->][Group->]Object->property->Value
Navigation GUIS in this high-level dimention and it's control structure is
paramount actually - working in enterprise systems is quite different than
working in single stack releases...
If you work on medium to long term or repetitive projects you can only
appreciate this* once you hit again another similar data structure to manage
in your application. It doesn't matter if it is record management or
GUI-text-style based controls for a gui. They should always do their best
across the environment.
And with TAOO you can distribute these GUIs as objects and also improve them
all with only one, I repeat, one handler or change.
Distribution of application resources is easy to implement as we all know.
So automatism in a centralized system is only that much easier...
I don't know what else to say. im off the subject already probably...
After 8 years of economy, programming since 1982, im not shy of saying I put
the best of the best I learned or experienced since then into it... if it is
not clear to you or many others, I must be doing something wrong... but if I
really enjoy it's benefits since 15 years, how can I be so wrong?
cheers
Xavier
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