2017-03-20 7:18 GMT-03:00 Otto Behrens <otto@finworks.biz>:
Hi,
We also made several sub-classes of Magritte classes and / or components. This causes a lot of problems because when we upgraded Magritte it was difficult. It also shows that Magritte (the core classes) cannot change much because the impact will be high for most users of Magritte. This makes us think that Magritte is not easy to use or customise. And it also appears as if all the custom changes are not being generalised into the framework. Perhaps us users of Magritte should stand back and discuss our changes and issues more so that we can improve it? I suppose we need some magritte champion(s) to take it somewhere.
To get more flexibility with Magritte styling we are using CSS and classes more in stead of rendering in a different way. Often one can get away with adding a CSS class and changing the style sheet.
This is a bit fluffy, but it there's a lot of stuff to talk about here. In principle, are you sharing my frustration with Magritte?
I'm not frustrated, but I share the feeling that we're missing valuable contributions from other users. The thing with Magritte is that everything is done by subclassing, the metamodel part (MADescription subclasses) is pretty composable, but the seaside components are bound to whatever CSS framework is chosen, there isn't much to do there other than subclassing. This has several drawbacks to integrate code from different teams/projects, because you end up having to use a whole set of classes from the "foreign" library (e.g. QCMagritte) rather than just a few components. One thing that I disliked is the fact that from Magritte 2 to 3 the descriptions moved from the class side to the instance side, to allow dynamic containers based on instance state/behavior, this is really powerful, but I'd preferred a two step lookup to build the instances, it is... look at the instance side first, and then class side, this way you can manipulate description without having to instantiate a sample instance. This is mandatory if you're building an UI like a reporting, querying tool where do not know in advance which instances are going to be returned. However I think this is a discussion for the Magritte, or Seaside, mailing list. Regards, -- Esteban