brad barclay

I don't think anyone has ever done this. Doing so might be a bit
time-consuming, as to do it "right" you'll need to create Java objects
for every WPS object you want to grant access to, with accessors for all
their methods and fields. Not a small job.

I _could_ do it, but don't forsee having the time to do so anywhere in
the next couple of years (have to get working on my Java USB for OS/2
stuff first ).

Brad BARCLAY

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From the OS/2 WARP v4.5 Desktop of Brad BARCLAY.
The jSyncManager Project: http://www.jsyncmanager.org


jeff

That would be kind if you.
<snip/>

The graphical classes wouldldprobaby not be possible in a first pass.
However, as a more modest approach, being able to create WPS objects and such
(a la REXX) would be useful.

Access to EAs, creating, moving, copying whole WPS objects, opening/closing
them. Dropping the bar low would be the way to go for a first pass.

uhhh I did a partial implementation of that. > The problem was that I had
to have a database on the backend to mimic EA support, which made it very
flexible, but also just slow for certain operations. I rather liked it and
even had a class loader, so you could run Java apps more or less like
standard WPS objects (specify the jar files, main method and off you go).
This was not done with an eye to more than being an intellectual exercise
though, rather than a functional tool -- hey I got OS/2!

brad barclay

Okay -- in this case you don't really care too much about actually
hooking into the OO system itself, but you want some helper methods to
mimic some of the core OS/2 WPS functions (as opposed to "metheds" which
are attached to objects). This is a significantly easier task.


I would skip the back-end database idea, and instead use a HashMap with
serializable objects. An "EA" object hashed against the object ID would
be a whole lot more lightweight, and the whole thing could be serialized
at exit (and deserialized at load, or even on demand).


You should put this code up an SourceForge somewhere .

Brad BARCLAY

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From the OS/2 WARP v4.5 Desktop of Brad BARCLAY.
The jSyncManager Project: http://www.jsyncmanager.org


jeff

(This is rapidly heading off into being a development thread. We should
continue this off-line if there is interest.)

Yes. It would be nice to have direct java extensions to the WPS, but that
ain't gonna happen without some serious low-level coding, which is probably
beyond everyone but IBM itself.

I've maintained for years that the killer app for OS/2 is the WPS. Every
other OO GUI I've seen is just broken. Pretty pictures and clickable thingies
are nice, but it is the object technology we really need...


Tried that and

* it scales miserably (slow loading due to deserialization),

* it litters your hard drive with all sorts of garbage

* it eats memory like nobody elses business.

Plus, a user does not want to merrily use a system then find hundreds of
mysterious files showing up in unlikely places, and even exercising my
proto-implementation, I could see the writing on the wall. A database at the
backend slows down casual access -- you wouldn't want to do the EPM trick of
hiding all your formatting information for a do***ent in the EAs --but is
pretty uniform (with the right indices, of course) overall. Of course, I do
lots of database programming...

That's a good idea. Maybe I should pretty it up and do that this next vacation.