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by Carl Ranson >> Thu, 2 Mar 2000 2:57:42 GMT

One more observation about the way we (or is it I) work as software developers.

It seems that I often have a given set of methods/classes open (lets use the term "Work Context") and discovering that I need to branch off for a moment and check/modify something else.

My work habit seems to be concentration on one area of the system with frequent short checks or changes to other parts of the system.

Many of the suggestions I have made here are about reducing the need for the developer to "switch contexts", flyover help - higher level of visibility for attributes/methods etc, but I don't think they can be eliminated completely. It might be nice if I could "park" or "stack" the existing context, investigate whatever it is I need to check, and get back to where I was.

Its certainly not handled well by a MDI interface which even Microsoft is abandoning, these days.

Does anyone know of software that employs this paradigm or something similar ?

Thanks,
CR

by Torrie Moore >> Thu, 2 Mar 2000 23:33:39 GMT

Yes! We have written an application that involves several form stacks. The user can be working in one stack, AltTab back to the main menu and then start another stack. Relating the example to the Jade IDE it would work something like this.

Working the the IDE you want to go to another part of the system (currently have 2 or 3 class browsers open, a couple of workspaces etc) You choose a menu item that open another MDI Frame with the schema browser only. You can then change schemas etc and look at aother parts of the system. It basically relates to opening another copy of the application (Jade). I think you can do this when using a fat client node by running a workspace / script that starts a new application with app=Jade and Schema=JadeSchema??? Once you have finished with the other context you can close it or just alt tab back to the previous context.

Torrie