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.