Today, the good people of Runtime Revolution Ltd. presented an impressive webinar, showcasing the brand new Data Grid control that is a salivating new feature of Revolution 3.5 - in fact, this new control has given us a lot more than what most people would want from a table control. You can setup everything from a straightforward table with multiple alignments, to a spectacular form with dynamically resizing rows containing arbitrary controls with judicious use of template groups.
This crown jewel was developed using the other new big technological addition to Revolution: behaviors. This allows you to write a script once and apply it to several other controls at once - and when you update the original behavior script, all those controls adopt the change in behavior automatically.
Of course, if you're used to object-oriented programming, this sounds like simple inheritance. The xCard paradigm, pioneered over 20 years ago by Apple's HyperCard is traditionally object-based but not fully object-oriented; there's a limited set of built-in controls and you can 'specialize' these by adding a script.
Another typical OO design pattern, Chain of Responsibility, was the basis of the xCard message path, which allows developers to place handlers for events, command and function calls in a central place - if you needed to know where the event originated, you could use 'the target' property to work your magic from there.
Strictly speaking this was enough to build something like the Data Grid in the past, but the new 'behavior' feature makes it a lot easier. The 'me' object points to the 'target' rather than the button that contains the 'behavior' script - so we no longer have to subject ourselves to 'long id' shenanigans to make sure we're modifiying the right controls.
Experiments with the new 'behavior' scripting methods have me pondering how I can adopt this for all my Revolution projects and which controls I can rebuild and put together in a single library for reuse - and perhaps for others to use. Ah, if only there was a function to conjure a Time-Turner so I could do everything I want to do but fail to find the time for...
