[ale] Object Model on Linux

[David Hamm]

Douglas Todd wrote:
> 
> Some ideas on implementation:
> 
> Brad Dixon has made a demo of IBM's Common User Access interface
> available at http://r52h146.res.gatech.edu/~bdixon/ibmcua.zip. It's
> a neat idea, and may be a worthwhile user interface to implement.
> 
> In the demo, the end user is able to record a macro which ties together
> various programs, pipes the output from one program to another, and is
> allowed to save the macro. Some extensions that would be nice are the
> ability to branch and loop, define variables and call, or jump to other
> macros. ( which in turn, could then call other programs ). To the user
> the interface is drag and drop.
> 
> I wonder how much work it would be to collect the different parameters
> for the binutils suite, and some of the common operations. I'm thinking
> that we could write a drag and drop interface where the icons represent
> utilities like grep, sed, awk, etc, and have a 'registry' that
> identifies
> how the utilities are called, ( the command line arguments ),
> icons that represent the utilities, and a shell program that allows
> the user to graphically connect these programs together.
> 
> For each utility, there would be an icon, and a set of data base entries
> that
> describes each utilities operations and functions. The GUI provides the
> 'test' function, and may either execute the utilities directly, or build
> a shell script and then execute the shell. Functionally, the GUI takes
> the place
> of BASH, and uses the 'registry' data base to format the command line
> arguments.
> 
> I can see some AI, and quite a bit of X programming in this project.
> 
> Any takers ? -)
> 
> Doug.
> 
> --
> dwt at atlanta.com
> doug.todd at sciatl.com
Ok, I'm in.  
I began thinking about building a file manager for Linux two months ago.
My lanugage of choice is C but in order to write the file manager I've
invested some time in learning C++. I think I've got the hang of it
now.  I've also been searching the net for tools to aid me in the
quest.  Below is a list of things I've found and how I had hoped to use
them.
	1. QT XWindow Library.  Seems to be robust but has some limitations. It
does not support
				the xpm graphic file format which I wanted to use for icons.  They
				do support other formats and are working on xpm.
				see http://www.troll.no/

	2. Offix d & d lib: 	I'm not sure on the status of the Offix project,
it seems to 						have stagnated.  Until Qt puts drag & drop into their
lib I had 					hoped to use this one.  It's not the most robust d&d lib
but I have 					the source and with that I'd hope'd to make any
necessary changes. 
	
	3. ftplib:		This is a C library that you can use to automate an ftp
session. It 					includes demo tools like ftpdir ftpsend and ftpget.  I
was hoping 					to make interaction with ftp sights seamless.

	4. NetAtalk:    	Includes a library to write Mac files for sharing with
Macs.  I 					wanted to make sure that if a user wanted to work with a
Mac file 					the program would handle it properly. 

	5. Samba:		I'd like to be able to browse, mount and share smb shares
along 					with NFS.   

I've determined that the file manager would have to use URLs for
referencing files and data so I've got the basic URL calss together and
have begun work on the FTP class which inherits from the URL class.  Let
me know if this interests you, I'm open for suggestion and would welcome
any help I can get. 

Later

David