Re: Fluid Application Environment 3.0.alpha1 Released!
- Posted by ryanj Oct 12, 2013
- 2541 views
The startup is quite slow for the demo - 30 seconds on my (old) 2Ghz Xp system. Is there a reason for this, and are there any plans to speed it up? Perhaps the library could be put into a dll for speedier access - I have no idea if that would help or not (or even if it's possible)
I didn't think it would be that slow...wow. I haven't tested it on an older XP computer yet. I'm curious, do you know how long it takes for a win32lib application to start up on that machine? It looks like win32lib source code is about 1.78 MB, but FluidAE is only 659KB. Still, that's alot of code for the interpreter to convert to IL. I don't know how much I can speed it up. FluidAE is actually going to grow in size as I add more features. I was thinking about experimenting with separating the gui into a separate process that communicates with the application through shared memory. That's what FluidAE was going to be like originally, but I had to narrow my focus on my overly-ambitious project, lol.
You have obviously spent a considerable time thinking about the API - but to me, and I may be just me - it isn't as intuitive as you suggest. Perhaps some more hand holding in the manual, or more commented single and few widget demos would go a long way to help.
The layout system is similar to GTK and wxwidgets, again perhaps a little more detail in the manual, or demos would be helpful.
I admit, the API isn't explained as well as it should be. In the next few releases, I will be adding more smaller demos and examples in the manual. When I said "intuitive", I was referring to the fact that there aren't as many arguments for routines. There are fewer routines to begin with, plus, the data you pass to them clearly labels each property with a string. Also, I believe that once you get used to the FluidAE API, you will find it is pretty easy to build complex GUIs. (I am writing a few some-what complex applications with FluidAE right now to test my theory.)
I understand that things like menus and lists can be hard on the eyes, due to long nested sequences. I'm open to suggestions. After all, this is the very first Alpha version. 
Thanks for your constructive criticism.
