EiffelBuild Tips Window dropping last word of each line

[Stephen Smith]

Hi All,

Playing with EiffelBuild, and at first I thought the text in the Tip of the Day window had typos. But when I slowly resize the window, the text reflows, revealing previously hidden words, and hiding new ones.

No matter what size you make the window, the last word in each line is dropped from the display.

Using EiffelBuild 18.11.10.2592 GPL on Windows10.

Regards,

Stephen.

[Larry Rix]

I am unaware of anyone using EiffelBuild for production.

It does not seem to be an issue with EiffelBuild, but with Visual Builders in general.

The perform poorly in several ways:

• Difficult to integrate custom visual classes.
• Impossible to show deterministic complex visual changes in behavior.
• Difficult to integrate into regression or unit testing, which is critical to modern development.

Based on this, I've only ever seen EB used in casual passing and never for serious production development projects.

[r...@amalasoft.com]

I've used EiffelBuild quite a bit over the years, though not for an _end_product_.  I have developed a library that works with what EiffelBuild creates, allowing me to bootstrap projects with EiffelBuild, and even make some GUI changes (using EiffelBuild) after incorporating almost entirely custom code and classes, BUT the end product is not what comes out of EiffelBuild.  The EiffelBuild parts remain prototypical (in my projects), but still compatible, so I can continue to use EiffelBuild for experimenting with new layouts and such.  In the more production-oriented code, I simply remove the non-production elements during the initialization sequence.

I find EiffelBuild to be a very helpful tool, especially for early prototyping, though it can be a little quirky at times.

Speaking of handy-yet-quirky, please let me thank whoever came up with eimgemb.  It has its issues, but what a lifesaver when dealing with non-trivial pixmaps (I have a code-generated pixmap class for simple ones).

R

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[Larry Rix]

R! Now, this is an interesting post. I was unaware anyone had taken EiffelBuild seriously. Good for you!

[r...@amalasoft.com]

Thanks Larry.  Does it help make up for my idiot-fest on missing libraries?  :)

I did have to do a fair amount up front to make it work with my custom vision classes, but by doing that, I ended up with a handy-dandy and relatively painless process.

The key element is to have a kind of template for a customizable project that uses ebuild. 

There is a separate .ecf file for the actual project (vs the build_project*.ecf).  The vision2_application class is ignored, and replaced with my own application_root class.  My template comes with a new main_window.e that still inherits main_window_imp, but is otherwise custom.

There's not much more to it than that, other than the stuff that's strictly custom.  Ebuild doesn't realize I've hijacked it's output.

Once that's in place, then the main_window.e can be as custom as you'd like, and you can hand-build stuff into it, or take what ebuild gives you (from the generated main_window_imp class), and/or remove stuff that ebuild put in.

It makes whipping up gui gizmos more fun (though I don't actually _do_ fun; I know people who do)

R

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [eiffel-users] Re: EiffelBuild Tips Window dropping last
word of each line
From: Larry Rix <lar...@moonshotsoftware.com>

[Larry Rix]

The key to successful use of a generator is unchanging consistency. It hardly matters if code is hand-written or generated by a computer program. What counts is that the result is consistent in feature signature and naming. As long as it remains relatively constant, one can use the Bridge Pattern to either directly inherit or use Multiple Inheritance to extend and customize (or even further generalize).

We had a code generator that worked quite well and the equation was the same. While I have not looked at EB code in a while, I know that one of the design choices we made in our generator was that generated code needed to be human readable and had to conform to our coding standards, naming conventions, and other style constraints. The problem with many generators is they produce code that is hardly human-readable. People want to act like this is okay because it is (after all) "generated", so why would any human need to read and understand it. We took the opposite approach of believing that a human being may very well want to read it at some point and understand it because generated code impacts our descendant code equally with our hand code.

Anyway—I am happy to know you have had some degree of success at using EB generated code and perhaps have something of a framework (library or two) that allows you to extend it—perhaps even to the level of successful production code.

This raises the question of building a web app version—perhaps—Eiffel Web Builder, where the generator knows about EWF and perhaps some various Javascript libraries/frameworks, where it can have a visual builder much like EB, but the output is aimed at create web apps. There are plenty of examples out there. One that I have used is based on the Bootstrap library.

All the best to you!

[r...@amalasoft.com]

Thanks Larry; I couldn't agree more.

R

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [eiffel-users] Re: EiffelBuild Tips Window dropping last
word of each line
From: Larry Rix <lar...@moonshotsoftware.com>
Date: Tue, April 09, 2019 11:22 am
To: Eiffel Users <eiffel...@googlegroups.com>

[Stephen Smith]

The issue isn't with EiffelBuild, but the tool tip window that is part of EiffelBuild. I agree with your points on visual builders in general though.

The bug in the Tip of the Day dialog doesn't affect the usability of the tool in any way. It just gives a bad first impression - makes one think there are errors in the help text, which is actually not the case, as you see when you expand the dialog box.

Probably not high on the priority list since it sounds like not many people actually use it? But thought I would report it nonetheless.