Panther: NSController, bindings, etc
Panther: NSController, bindings, etc
- Subject: Panther: NSController, bindings, etc
- From: Shaun Wexler <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 13:04:57 -0800
Patience, guys. There have been mostly NEGATIVE opinions posted so far
about the "new" controller layer and bindings facilities in Panther,
which is to be expected, both from those who have only recently
experimented with the classes, and from those who don't yet understand
them. Granted, these concepts are new to most developers, different to
those who are used to EOF/NeXT, and frustrating to most, due to lack of
basic documentation and sample code. People should spend more time
with the new technologies, before casting stones. Many things are
possible... think outside the "box" a bit, and give it some time.
Obviously, the classes will continue to mature. But they are
definitely usable, and very powerful.
I'd like to post my officially POSITIVE opinion. For one, I've been
working with the controllers and bindings since WWDC, and have
completely rewritten my now-Panther-only app to take advantage of them.
There are several "other" ways to utilize the bindings to save coding
and development time. It's not always necessary to use an NSController
object to manage bindings between model and view... most objects,
including NSTableView, can be directly bound to model objects without
an intervening controller. NSValueTransformers are simple and
efficient to implement, and quite useful. And, I'm using the bindings
and controllers across multiple threads and thru Distributed Objects
with success, through careful application structuring. And I'm 100%
sold on the bindings layer. It really works!
Early on, I wrote a Panther sample app which exercised most of the new
features, including all the controller classes, bindings, new controls,
etc. It resulting in filing 20-30 bugs on Panther, of which most have
been resolved already. As of a few builds ago, my sample app was
broken, probably due to the fact that about 90% of the code I wrote was
for workarounds, and was no longer required after the bugs they exposed
had been subsequently fixed. In that app, I was creating some pretty
wild manual bindings, to get the behaviors I wanted, but the demo
proved to me that it was certainly possible. I expect that a few new
NSController subclasses will emerge soon. Apple will certainly
continue to improve the new features. And more developers will begin
to open-source the Panther code we've developed for ourselves over the
past few months as well.
;-)
--
Shaun Wexler
MacFOH
http://www.macfoh.com
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