Woah, I just checked out that MUI tutorial code. Thanks a lot... It really opened my eyes.
First the good part. There was a lot of functionality in the examples. And I wasn't as frightened off as I thought I would be.
The bad part. There were no comments in the code, which are absolutely essential in tutorials, and I didn't know what the hell was going on beyond realising that there was some sort of structure getting populated. At least I think it was a structure. And I have no idea of what that structure is. Hell, it looked greek.
It could just be that this is just not the way I am used to programming. I come from a windows .NET and Java background and I've used C/C++ on simple pc text based applications at various banks. You may scoff at the high level languages I just mentioned but they are a zillion times more user friendly and productive and clearer to understand than the code I just saw. They have to be.
What I can't believe is that people actually program this way. WTF!!! No wonder beginners have no idea where to start.
The first thing I think I'm going to do, unless someone tells me it already exists, for the entire Amiga community, and especially the beginners, is encapsulate the library into C++ classes that are friendly to highlevel windows coders. Not the windows C++ programmers, who are just too clever. It just seems like too much low level gobbledy gook C code. I can understand for a game, but for standard UI development this is just too much.
I must, I simply must, create things like form object classes and various user control classes with all the relevant properties easily accessible. And I'll have to figure out an event driven kind of model somehow rather than just rely on a running loop. Yeah, I'll probably have to write a GUI builder too, maybe even automate the event handling. Looking at the code I can already see how I could do that. And Gosh, I'll have to dig up that String object manipulation code I wrote like 10 or more years ago.
This is just too bizzare. I really can't believe people are still programming this way. No really, is this some sort of joke? Is this really the way you're expecting people to program? What is the easiest to use application development environment/libraries on the Amiga at the moment? Is it what I just saw? GeekGadgets?
If this is the state of Amiga programming then expect an infusion of different ideas from the other established platforms, because this way of programming is just not going to sit well with us. We gotta bring the Amiga programming community into the 21st century.
Sorry if I sounded adversarial, I'm just a little disappointed as I just realised I've got a lot more work to do than I thought to port what I've been building for the last couple of months and I've got to get cracking.
I guess I musn't be surprised as event driven programming came out around the mid nineties and probably never existed in the Amiga's heydey. I guess it could have been worse.
Are you sure there isn't anything that does event driven programming? Because really the newbies are gonna love it. I don't care what language it is.
Man, this just brings it home that we need java on Amiga, if only to use something like JBuilder to program on a different platform. It'll practically build the entire app for you, with all the event handlers. I probably could have built the examples visually faster than it took to read them. We really are missing out otherwise.
Please, let me know. No really. I mean, I'll clean this whole thing up I will, for the good of everyone. It doesn't look that hard to do. Maybe a couple of months of work and I'll probably have to do it anyway to port my app. I tinkered with building an XML DOM parser, that works, and a simple SQL developer database a little while ago that I could include. Hell.... I could really do this.
Hmmmmm. If there is a need for such a thing I think I could do it. If I'm gonna spend all that time though, I might really go for it and make it a marketable product.
Do you think it is something you would be interested in purchasing?
