January 93 - Editor's Note
Editor's Note
Mary Elaine Califf
Here's an issue with something for everyone. We haveseveral Technical Features and
two shorter Tricks of the Trade, along with our reviews, columns, and the usual news
from the MADA office and regional MADA groups. First, for the developer looking for a
good software development methodology, Kent Sandvik reviews Ivar Jacobsen's Object
Oriented Software Engineering and concludes that Jacobsen may not have the complete
answer, but he does have some interesting and potentially valuable ideas.
On the 'Practical' Side
We have a wealth of articles with practical tips and useful source code. Jeroen Schalk
and Kent Sandvik show us how to extend the Standard File dialogs using 'View'
resources in the Children of the Dogcow column. Angelika Peters shows us a way to
handle initializing additional fields of 'View' resources in our Tricks of the Trade
feature. Nick Nallick is back again with more interesting tips. This time he provides
help for those who want customized windows, but don't want to write WDEFs. He
demonstrates how to simulate the behavior of custom WDEFs using MacApp. Vinko Tsui
shows us how to use Jasik's Incremental Build System with MPW or ObjectMaster in
order to speed up development cycles.
If you have an application that requires window menus in addition to the global
menubar, don't miss Craig Hopson and Gene Osteen's article. For those interested in
writing domain-specific class libraries (and I suspect more of us should be than are),
Steve Wilson provides some useful tips based on his own experiences in developing a
genetic algorithms framework. Those who need to manage large data files, with
possibly several different object types, should be sure to read Bill Colsher's
description of TVirtualDocument, a subclass of TFileBasedDocument that handles
reading and writing multiple object types and leaves data on disk unless it's needed in
memory. Gordon Apple is back with an article on using behaviors to integrate different
types of TTextListViews into a single view and to support drag-and-drop and
double-click features.
Other Environments
This issue is primarily devoted to MacApp, but we do have a review of OOPC, an
environment that Gary Odom introduced to us in the last issue, by Mark Gerl. Gary is
also back, this time with a description of OOPC's memory management, the first in a
series of articles on the architecture of OOPC.
Upcoming Issues
Our March issue will feature the February MADA conference. Most of the articles will
be related to conference presentations, and we will also have reports on the conference
itself.
In following issues we look forward to reviews of NeoAccess, POET, ObjectMaster,
InsideOut, and Component Workshop, as well as technical articles on Prograph, MCL,
Dylan, SmallTalk, BETA, Bedrock, and, of course, MacApp. We will also be introducing
you to VDL Companion™, a currently beta CASE tool from SBM International. VDL
Companion will be a partial answer for those who, like me, read Goldstein and Alger's
book and decided that Solution-Based Modeling looked very interesting, but clearly
required some CASE tools that they didn't have time to write.