GBPVR Plugin Helper DLL

[KingArgyle]

Jorm and I have been tossing back and forth the idea of a common Utility DLL that can be used to store common functions that all Plugin Developers find themselve writing over and over. The thought is to try to eliminate the duplication of code, and make it even easier for Plugin Developers to write new apps. The plugin community would maintain this, and add or change it as necessary.

The main thing to start this off is what Common things do you find yourself writing or reusing in your Plugins.

The first thing I see are the Various advance search functions that we have come up with. I know that a lot of the web admin searches are very similiar to Jorm's key word searches.

Next would be a set of common functions to retrieve information between the GBPVR database and Jorm's Zap2It extended database. If it is available, then Plugin developers can query between the two with one common interface.

Please feel free to add to this thread, we'd like to guage the level of interest in this.

[darrin75]

sounds great to me

[jasonf]

Sounds like a good thing to include in the widget library.

[firefox_i]

Hi there,
is it planned to include such things as
- onscreen keyboard
- onscreen numerical keybad (adapted to enter times etc.)

This would be great.

Is there a planning when the DLL is available ?
What is meant with the "widget library" ?

Sorry if some of these questions are a bit stupid, but I´m a newbie here.....

Regards
Sven

[jasonf]

Quote[/b] (firefox_i @ Dec. 14 2004,04:03)]Is there a planning when the DLL is available ?
What is meant with the "widget library" ?

A widget is a generic term that is primarily known as a control today (things like scrollbars, listboxes, checkboxes, etc).  In the classic definition, it's something in the GUI that interacts with the OS.

The widget library, as I termed it, is a collection of such widgets that could be used by GBPVR plugins.  There's other things thrown into the library that aren't actual controls (useful data structures, etc).

Say, for example, that you need a listbox.  You would normally have to code logic to hold the items, display only a subset of the items, handle keypress events to scroll through the items, track which item was selected, and then render the whole thing.  The code gets really messy when you have multiple listboxes in one plugin.

With a listbox widget control, you simply create an instance of it, initialize the properties (to set the list and also to establish look-and-feel), and then call its render() method during the plugin's render() execution.  When the listbox has focus, you also need to pass through keystrokes, and it handles the scrolling, etc.

The look-and-feel part is where the widgets can greatly enhance skinning abilities, or at least make it really easy to drastically change the plugin's appearance.  For instance, each bordered control (like a listbox or a button) has a BorderStyle property.  If you don't like the normal rounded frame style, you can switch it to any of the other available ones with one line of code.

I've also worked on the ability to completely instantiate widget controls from XML representations.  This will eventually lead the way to skinners being able to re-position/resize controls and change look and feel properties outside of code.  Maybe it will lead into a graphical plugin/skin designer (it's easy to think big at this point, but hard to actually implement in a timely fashion).

As far as DLL availability, I'm not sure at this point.  If there's interest in helping to develop, I can already provide developer access to the source repository.  But as far as a release that plugin developers can take and run with, that might be a ways off--there's still more things that I would like to establish before the library is ready for plugin development.

However, having said that, I might as well make a preview release of the controls that have already been written so that people can see what's involved and be able to play with them.  This wouldn't include some of the other parts of the library that I'm creating to make using the widgets easier.

[jazzmanjac]

The widgets idea is fantastic!

I thought I'd give the plugin writing thing a try so I created a skeleton plugin. Once that was done I spent more time
working on the graphics than I did working on the plugin functionality. Having some sort of widget library would probably
encourage more would-be plugin writers to actually write a plugin.

I've seen several -- okay, maybe just a few -- plugins use CommonUtlities.cs. Maybe this functionality can be used in the
dll as it appears people swipe this code and shove it into thier plugin code anyway. It would be nice to centralize
reusable code in one place.

This is bit off-topic... but what are the terms of using the source code that has been released. GPL, anyone?

J

[reven]

yeah they are free to use, a plugin developer wouldnt mind if you use them, since you might make something they would use. the feeling is the more good plugins being made the better.

i use commonutitlies quite a bit, just make them all static and away i go, takes the code out of my classes and makes them easily accessible to all areas of my plugin.