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On Sun, 21 May 2006, Bernhard Treutwein wrote:
> 1. Proprietary file format:
>
> Although I really like the benifits of the odc format (active contents
> forms, stamp elements, commanders etc.) the only program, which
> can read it is BlackBox. Most programming languages store their
> source in pure ASCII (or Unicode) and have proprietary formats
> only for their "designers".
> I think it should be possible to store all ontents in a XML format
> and write a converter/importer/exporter to store the contents of
> odc (without any loss) in XML.
When you read back a document with an embedded element, say a rotating
cube, then an applet is started and you are seeing a rotating cube.
Now imagine that you read the XML document into say a Visual Basic
(assuming the VB can read XML; I am not sure). So VB enconters
a token "Start applet RotatingCube; Insert RotatingCube" (I am making up
the syntax, of course). How can VB understand such a token if the code
of RotatingCube is not available in VB?
This opens up the whole set of questions. You either need to port
the RotatingCube to VB and distribute beforehand. Or you have to embed
the source code in the document and let VB compile it on the fly.
What reperesentation would you use to distribute the code? Obviously,
not Pascal, but also not VB because the document may be read by VCC.
So you need to have a precompiled representation. Precompiled for which
CPU? It should be portable, so maybe use bytecodes? The list of questions
seems to be growing. Perhaps XML has already answered all these questions.
On the other hand, if you do not need to distribute active elements,
then write the text in RTF and the problem is solved at least at the
wordprocessor level. Word can read RTF written by BlackBox. I am doing
it all the time. There is not much to complain about, other than
occasional glitches concerning paragraph formatting. These
glitches are minor issues that can be improved as a matter of BB
maintainance.
> A complete port of BlackBox to bothe GardensPoint backends
> (.NET & JVM) would provide a very portable cross-platform
> implementation. It might be some work (or even more), but I think
> it would be worth the effort.
As you said, these other projects are not yet complete.
I think the major issue here is 64-bit support, future versions
of Windows, and portability to other OSs. If the .NET or JVM
have already solved these issues, then it is a serious proposition.
On the other hand, in case .NET and/or JVM are still not quite there,
then it is less than serious proposition. I am not sure. I hear, also
from yourself, that these other projects are still beta.
W
--- BlackBox
--- send subject HELP or UNSUBSCRIBE to blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy
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Received on Sun May 21 2006 - 21:37:30 UTC