Editor’s Notes: Overview

Mary Elaine Califf

Mary Elaine Califf MADA.EDITOR@applelink.apple.com

Welcome to the September/October issue. We have reviews of two programming tools. ObjectMaster 2.0 is now available, and Vinko Tsui describes its improvements and new features. Bill Colsher reviews Classy, a tool for working with TCL and Think C that is currently unavailable because it was recently purchased by Symantec.

We also have technical overviews of two products. SmalltalkAgents is the new Smalltalk implementation that stirred up a lot of interest at MADACON this year. You can look forward to a review of SmalltalkAgents in an upcoming issue of FrameWorks. Bo Klintberg provides us with the first of two articles on his OSL Scripting Components. This source code provides an OSL solution without modifications to MacApp. This issue's article focuses on the client side; the next article will focus on the server side.

As always, we have an assortment of technical articles. Apropos torecent discussions on MACAPP3TECH$, Mike Rossetti presents his CHLockSaver class, along with two related classes, as a simple solution for handling locking of handles and TObject descendants. Mikel Evins discusses reflection, a common capability of OODLs, but not of static object oriented languages like C++. He discusses its uses, the capabilities present in various languages, and how it might be incorporated into static language applications.

Laughing Water plunges us into a world of fantasy(?) as he discusses the application of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to programming environments. He applies the guidelines to Prograph to see how it measures up.

Finally Mark Klocke's article discusses the importance of object-oriented analysis and design, and applies it to an example application.

Change

In the last few weeks I haven't been doing much object-oriented programming, or for that matter much programming of any kind, but I have been engaged in an activity that has reminded me very much of converting an application from MacApp 2 and Object Pascal to MacApp 3 and C++: we've just moved. The house is better; the neighborhood is better; the yard is much better. But there's still all the packing to do and all the furniture to move (moving is the only time I wish I didn't have a piano), and the children must adjust to a new home, a new daycare, and a new church. I've been painfully reminded that, no matter what the benefits, major life changes are hard.

The same applies to major changes in programming. The switch from structured to object-oriented programming took a lot of learning. And the switch from one language to another, one environment to another, or one application framework to another are also going to be difficult, even when they're also rewarding. Jesse Feiler gives some advice in his article on finding and evaluating new software architectures and then handling the changes involved in adopting them.

And as always

FrameWorks is looking for articles that will be helpful to programmers using object oriented technologies. If you have some classes that would be of interest to other programmers, if you know of a useful tool, language, class library, or book that you would like to write an overview or a review of, please contact me.