I am reaching a point where my illustrations regarding BSA are more and more the real thing. Property Editor is now real so I can start edit the components and add properties. I have a few days work setting up correct properties and then I will deal with saving and loading projects and a few other outstanding issues before I am on to generating code. Or well – don’t worry – I have plenty of work left yet.
Keep in mind that BSA uses Universal Diagrams, so unlike other design tools you can draw multiple things on the same diagram. In the illustration above I have drawn multiple dialogs. Each dialog has a Name, each component have an unique name within that dialog. Each dialog only cares about the component located on top of itself – so it is perfectly legal and beneficial to draw multiple dialogs on the same diagram as I have illustrated above.
Only basic components will be build in as the next, big feature is component libraries created by BSA itself. For example standard dialog boxes, gauges etc – I did decide to use a HMI solution fuled by GPU’s for a reason.
I used to design HMI solutions as a profession some 25 years ago, but never jumped on to the web thing. Watching over Web developers making HMI’s I was stunned about how limited their tools was as I have never understood why web developement needed to be worse than classic desktop development. Since the illustration above is a specification I can easily generate it as a Web page, desktop or tablet design at my chosing – without the developer needing to worry to much about the details except one – screen resolution if you use tablets/phones as target.
Qt will deal with execution on multiple platforms, but I do get an extra challenge using Qt – Print Preview and Printing is far from strate forward with that framework, but I will deal with that later.