Anomaly on Wiki4D GuiLibraries page

[John Reimer]

Hello Don,

> Stewart Gordon wrote:
> 
>> John Reimer wrote:
>> <snip>
>>> 2)  You don't have enough information to go on to make that change,
>>> unless you have dicussed this with Walter.  Maybe he doesn't want to
>>> recognize the old DWT as "standard" anymore, if it isn't actively
>>> developed.  Maybe neither library is "standard".
>>> 
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Maybe you're right.  But if Walter hasn't stripped Phobos DWT of its
>> 'standard' title, I think technically it still applies.  But it might
>> be more practical to consider neither to be.
>> 
> I don't think that it was _ever_ accepted as "the standard library".
> It's more that it was a proposed standard, and it died almost
> immediately after being proposed for standardisation.
> 


That's also possible.  But then we have no idea since Walter didn't say anything 
more about it.  It's all conjecture.


Also, here is the reason the project died soon after being proposed.  The 
reason it /looked/ like his "blessing" nixed the project was because he proposed 
it before having communicated with the pototential developers to find out 
how involved/committed they were with the process.  Instead, he just announced 
it... and shocked a couple of us out of our skins :).   As far as I knew 
(since I was contributing to dwt at the time) none of us had enough time/skill/energy 
to see the project through to completeion -- with the exception of Kris (and 
maybe a couple others) who had loads of skill but perhaps little time, since 
he was working hard on other important projects. We were mostly feeling things 
out in the background to see how far we could go with the idea. Meanwhile 
Kris had tried to help the process by contributing a Java to D converter 
that he had thrown together to automate as much of the SWT conversion as 
possible; he also convinced Walter to support internal classes and anonymous 
classes in DMD (I think; I can't remember which or both: Kris made many important 
proposals based on practical stress-testing of the language/compiler some 
of which were ignored)... Also the compiler was still quite buggy making 
it sometimes exasperating to work on large projects like this one.  


Although there was some excitement behind the project, there was sizeable 
lack of motivation: it was very easy to get people interested in the idea, 
but practically impossible to find people who were willing to contribute 
to it (this is still the case with new dwt, but to a much lesser extent since 
the community has grown since then).  Unfortunately Walter gave his blessing 
without determining or knowing this.  When the project crashed after this, 
he apparently felt he had caused it to do so; he had not.   Thus, I don't 
blame Walter at all for its demise, although I think he would have avoided 
some of the pain if he had chatted with a few of us first.  Regardless, nobody 
lost completely on that one because, awhile later, Shawn Liu took up the 
guantlet from where we left off (which means he did a lot of work) and completed 
the windows port.  It enjoyed success on that platform for a time, but never 
progressed to the cross-platform initiative.


Back to the present.  Again, it would be easier if we just fix this situation 
by changing the "dwt" newsgroup to "GUI" and forget about the reference to 
"standard" for now.  The time to "standardize" a GUI library is perhaps when 
a project has proven its survivability and popularity enough to warrant the 
title.  Even so, GUI's are going to be particularly controversial, so it 
may be wise for D to avoid standardizing any such thing for awhile.  Just 
as there are people that don't like the Tango "style" (a very /few/ people, 
of course ;) ), even so there are going to be people that don't like dwt.  


Finally, the original purpose of standardizing DWT was to help promote D. 
 I think both D and DWT have matured to the point that they can both achieve 
that purpose without resorting to "standardization" of a GUI.


-JJR