[LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

[david]

Emanuel Rumpf wrote:
> 2011/8/11 david <gnome at hawaii.rr.com>:
>> Emanuel Rumpf wrote:
> 
>>> An application that doesn't attend to the GUI may create
>>> the impression that internals might be equally messed up.
>> An application that has a slick, polished GUI full of 'eye candy' always
>> makes me wonder that they put all their effort into the GUI,
>> and the internals are all messed up.
>>
> That's the other extreme.
> In my experience less spread, at least in the open software world.
> In closed, commercial applications OTOH ...

Yah, sometimes the eye candy (AKA Windows Vista) is what it's all about.

>> You need a balance. And the smaller the development team, the less is
>> available to achieve that balance. So I'd rather have the team put its
>> effort into making the engine run well rather than putting a custom paint
>> job on it.
>>
> Agreed.

We need more developers!

>> My opinion about software architecture: every app should be written in two
>> parts. The first is the back end that does all the real work, and comes
>> complete with a documented API usable from as many other languages as
>> possible. (If the API was usable from Java or Javascript, you could even
>> have a web UI for the app.)
>>
>> The second is the front end, the UI. If the two
>> parts are properly separated, you can have as many different UIs for the
>> application as there are people who care to program a UI for it. So you can
>> have a complex advanced UI for the experienced user with great domain
>> knowledge, you can have a simple "Beginniners" UI (such as a 'Wizard" style
>> UI) for the casual for first time user, you can have a text UI for blind or
>> visually-challenged users, etc. You can even have the back end run on a
>> completely different machine such as a server, and have the UI running on a
>> client workstation; quite useful for such situations as a smartphone UI
>> client that can tap the hardware of the backend for the heavy lifting.
>>
>> SuperCollider works like that. Seems like good futureproofing to me, without
>> locking things into a particular language for the UI.
>>
> Sounds like a good approach :)
> 
> What may be the best cross-platform approach for UI <--> Backend communication ?
> Sockets ? Shared mem. ? Which protocols ? D-bus ? Any recommendable C-libs ?

Haven't a clue. I don't know how that kind of thing is done, but somehow 
it's done.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community