Arthur van Hoff wrote "PdB" for people who prefer object oriented C syntax to PostScript. I wrote some PdB code for HyperLook, although I preferred writing directly in PostScript.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25432748
DonHopkins on Dec 15, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” q...
Leigh Klotz has written more PostScript than Jamie too, while working at Xerox! But "KLOTZ IS A LOGO PRIMITIVE [BEEP BEEP BEEP]". He wrote a 6502 assembler in Logo!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13524588
Leigh Klotz's comment on the regex article:
>OK, I think I’ve written more PostScript by hand than Jamie, so I assume he thinks I’m not reading this. Back in the old days, I designed a system that used incredible amounts of PostScript. One thing that made it easier for us was a C-like syntax to PS compiler, done by a fellow at the Turning Institute. We licensed it and used it heavily, and I extended it a bit to be able to handle uneven stack-armed IF, and added varieties of inheritance. The project was called PdB and eventually it folded, and the author left and went to First Person Software, where he wrote a very similar language syntax for something called Oak, and it compiled to bytecodes instead of PostScript. Oak got renamed Java.
>So there.
>And yes, we did have two problems…
>— comment by Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. on June 7th, 2008 at 3:22am JST (12 years, 6 months ago) — comment permalink
Arthur van Hoff (the author of PdB and the original Java compiler written in Java) has also written more PostScript than Jamie, especially if you count the PostScript written by programs he wrote, like PdB and GoodNeWS/HyperNeWS/HyperLook.
Here's the README file (and distribution) of PdB, Arthur van Hoff's object oriented C to PostScript compiler:
https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM/blob/master/NeWS/...
Also a paper by Arthur van Hoff about "Syntactic Extensions to PdB to Support TNT Classing Mechanisms":
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/PdB.txt
Some before and after examples, like menu.h menu.pdb menu.PS:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/HyperLook/Turing/hn3...
menu.h: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/HyperLook/Turing/hn3...
menu.pdb: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/HyperLook/Turing/hn3...
menu.PS: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/HyperLook/Turing/hn3...
GoodNeWS/HyperNeWS/HyperLook:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...
pvg on Dec 15, 2020 | prev [–]
Arthur van Hoff (the author of PdB and the original Java compiler written in Java) And the original AWT, if this is to be a full Airing of Sins.
DonHopkins on Dec 15, 2020 | parent [–]
Agreed, AWT was a horrible compromise in an impossible situation! But he made up for it by creating "Bongo" at Marimba.
Bongo is to Java+HyperCard as HyperLook is to PostScript+HyperCard.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...
>Arthur van Hoff [...]
>Marimba Castanet and Bongo
>Eventually Arthur left Sun to found Marimba, where he developed the widely used Castanet push distribution technology, and the under-appreciated Bongo user interface editing tool: a HypeLook-like user interface editor written in Java, that solved the runtime scripting extension problem by actually calling the Java compiler to dynamically compile and link Java scripts.
>Nobody else had ever done anything remotely like Bongo before in Java. Dynamic scripting with Java was unheard of at the time, but since he had written the compiler, he knew the API and how the plumbing worked, so had no qualms about calling the Java compiler at runtime every time you hit the “Apply” button of a script editor.
>Danny Goodman’s “Official Marimba Guide to Bongo”
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
>Danny Goodman, the author of the definitive HyperCard book, “The Complete HyperCard Handbook”, went on to write the “Official Marimba Guide to Bongo”, a great book about Bongo, described as the “reincarnation of HyperCard on the Internet”.
>[TODO: Write about Bongo’s relationship to HyperCard, HyperLook and Java.]
>Java applets are everywhere on Web pages these days, but if you’ve made the move to Java from a contemporary programming environment you’ve probably been dismayed by its relative immaturity. The Official Marimba Guide to Bongo covers Marimba’s Bongo environment, which is designed to allow rapid development of Java user interfaces. The book shows you how to use the large library of graphics “widgets” supplied with Bongo, how to wire them together with simple scripting, and how to integrate other Java applets. It also explains how Bongo can be used to build channels for Marimba’s Castanet system. -Amazon.com Review
>Java users should be rejoicing at the promise of programming aid Bongo, which is is the reincarnation of HyperCard on the Internet. It is fitting that the first major book about Bongo comes from Goodman, the author of the definitive HyperCard book of days gone by (The Complete HyperCard Handbook, Random, 1994). His background is as a journalist, not a technologist, and readers will make good use of this first-rate introduction. This book will circulate. -Library Journal Review
Unfortunately Marimba's Bongo got overshadowed by Sun's announcement of "Java Beans" which Sun was pushing with much fanfare and handwaving as an alternative to "ActiveX", but which eventually turned out to actually be just a server side data modeling technology, not a client gui framework.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784027
[...]
Marimba developed Bongo, a Java-based gui toolkit / user interface editor / graphical environment, inspired by HyperCard (and HyperLook), which they used to develop and distribute interactive user interfaces over Castanet.
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo, By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and "live code" at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can't hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.
Danny Goodman, who wrote the book on HyperCard, also wrote a book about Bongo. Arthur later founded Flipboard and JauntVR, and now works at Apple.
Here's a paper I wrote comparing Bongo with IFC (Netscape's much-ballyhooped Java Internet Foundation Classes). (Notice how IFC = Internet Foundation Classes was Netscape's answer to MFC = Microsoft Foundation Classes. Never define your product's name in terms of a reaction to your widely successful competitor's name. cough SunSoft cough)
NetScape's Internet Foundation Classes and Marimba's Bongo
https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html
>In summary, I think it was too early to write a Java toolkit before JDK 1.1, so IFC has gone and done a lot of its own stuff, which will have to be drastically changed to take advantage of the new stuff. Bongo is not as far down the road of painting itself into a corner like that, and if some effort is put into it, to bring it up to date with the new facilities in Java, I think it will be a better framework than IFC. Java Beans remains a big unknown, that I don't have a lot of faith in. Arthur says Java Beans does too much, and I'm afraid it may try to push competing frameworks like IFC and Bongo out of the limelight, instead of just providing a low level substrate on top of which they can interoperate (like the TNT ClassCanvas). If Bongo can pull off ActiveX integration with style and grace, then it wins hands down, because I doubt IFC can, and I don't trust Sun to deliver on their promises to do that with Java Beans.
More:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was. [...]
But he made up for it by creating "Bongo" at Marimba.
Bongo is to Java+HyperCard as HyperLook is to PostScript+HyperCard.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...
>Arthur van Hoff [...]
>Marimba Castanet and Bongo
>Eventually Arthur left Sun to found Marimba, where he developed the widely used Castanet push distribution technology, and the under-appreciated Bongo user interface editing tool: a HypeLook-like user interface editor written in Java, that solved the runtime scripting extension problem by actually calling the Java compiler to dynamically compile and link Java scripts.
>Nobody else had ever done anything remotely like Bongo before in Java. Dynamic scripting with Java was unheard of at the time, but since he had written the compiler, he knew the API and how the plumbing worked, so had no qualms about calling the Java compiler at runtime every time you hit the “Apply” button of a script editor.
>Danny Goodman’s “Official Marimba Guide to Bongo”
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
>Danny Goodman, the author of the definitive HyperCard book, “The Complete HyperCard Handbook”, went on to write the “Official Marimba Guide to Bongo”, a great book about Bongo, described as the “reincarnation of HyperCard on the Internet”.
>[TODO: Write about Bongo’s relationship to HyperCard, HyperLook and Java.]
>Java applets are everywhere on Web pages these days, but if you’ve made the move to Java from a contemporary programming environment you’ve probably been dismayed by its relative immaturity. The Official Marimba Guide to Bongo covers Marimba’s Bongo environment, which is designed to allow rapid development of Java user interfaces. The book shows you how to use the large library of graphics “widgets” supplied with Bongo, how to wire them together with simple scripting, and how to integrate other Java applets. It also explains how Bongo can be used to build channels for Marimba’s Castanet system. -Amazon.com Review
>Java users should be rejoicing at the promise of programming aid Bongo, which is is the reincarnation of HyperCard on the Internet. It is fitting that the first major book about Bongo comes from Goodman, the author of the definitive HyperCard book of days gone by (The Complete HyperCard Handbook, Random, 1994). His background is as a journalist, not a technologist, and readers will make good use of this first-rate introduction. This book will circulate. -Library Journal Review
Unfortunately Marimba's Bongo got overshadowed by Sun's announcement of "Java Beans" which Sun was pushing with much fanfare and handwaving as an alternative to "ActiveX", but which eventually turned out to actually be just a server side data modeling technology, not a client gui framework.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784027
[...]
Marimba developed Bongo, a Java-based gui toolkit / user interface editor / graphical environment, inspired by HyperCard (and HyperLook), which they used to develop and distribute interactive user interfaces over Castanet.
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo, By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and "live code" at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can't hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.
Danny Goodman, who wrote the book on HyperCard, also wrote a book about Bongo. Arthur later founded Flipboard and JauntVR, and now works at Apple.
Here's a paper I wrote comparing Bongo with IFC (Netscape's much-ballyhooped Java Internet Foundation Classes). (Notice how IFC = Internet Foundation Classes was Netscape's answer to MFC = Microsoft Foundation Classes. Never define your product's name in terms of a reaction to your widely successful competitor's name. cough SunSoft cough)
NetScape's Internet Foundation Classes and Marimba's Bongo
https://donhopkins.com/home/interval/ifc-vs-bongo.html
>In summary, I think it was too early to write a Java toolkit before JDK 1.1, so IFC has gone and done a lot of its own stuff, which will have to be drastically changed to take advantage of the new stuff. Bongo is not as far down the road of painting itself into a corner like that, and if some effort is put into it, to bring it up to date with the new facilities in Java, I think it will be a better framework than IFC. Java Beans remains a big unknown, that I don't have a lot of faith in. Arthur says Java Beans does too much, and I'm afraid it may try to push competing frameworks like IFC and Bongo out of the limelight, instead of just providing a low level substrate on top of which they can interoperate (like the TNT ClassCanvas). If Bongo can pull off ActiveX integration with style and grace, then it wins hands down, because I doubt IFC can, and I don't trust Sun to deliver on their promises to do that with Java Beans.
More:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
>Wow, a blast from the past! 1996, what a year that was. [...]
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo
>By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
>Official Marimba Guide to Bongo, by Danny Goodman
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...
>SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
[...]
>The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data
>We will return to these three important dimensions of Code, Graphics and Data as a recurring theme throughout this article. But which way to go from here?
>Alan Kay on NeWS:
>“I thought NeWS was ‘the right way to go’ (except it missed the live system underneath). It was also very early in commercial personal computing to be able to do a UI using Postscript, so it was impressive that the implementation worked at all.” -Alan Kay
It was indeed deeply inspired by and indebted to HyperCard, but of course had networking built in thanks to NeWS, and used PostScript as the data format and networking protocol (like XML and JSON are now used), and as the scripting language (which is more like Lisp than HyperTalk), and as the imaging model instead of pixels (including a nice built-in structured graphics editor component that supported EPS and raster images too, which you could use to build your own apps, property sheets, and editors, like the editable Clock component the article shows).
Another significant difference between HyperCard and HyperLook is that HyperLook used its own "stacks" to implement its own user interface for property sheets, etc. HyperCard just used the traditional Mac Toolbox for its user interface, instead of property sheets and dialogs being stacks. So you could edit and customize HyperLook property sheets and dialogs, and define new classes of HyperLook widgets, and then build your own seamlessly integrated property sheets for them (or just customize the property sheets of existing components). For example, I defined some NeWS Toolkit OPEN LOOK components like sliders and buttons and menus to support SimCity, all configurable with their own property sheets. The property sheets could use as many PostScript graphics editor components as they needed: for example, the editable clock component's property sheet let you edit its clock face, minute hand, and hour hand, which it rotated and drew around the clock. ...But it was just too slow to practically redraw a second hand once per second, so I left that out! Then you could copy and paste your custom clocks into any HyperLook stack, in case you cared what time it was.
However, this feature did enable "user interface vandalism", so HyperLook has a non-editable runtime system with the editors stripped out, that you could ship with apps:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/TalkRunTime.gif
In case you don't like PostScript as much as I do, Arthur van Hoff also wrote "PdB", an object oriented C to PostScript compiler that you could use to write classes and scripts. Later, after working on Java at Sun and leaving to found Marimba, Arthur wrote Bongo in Java, which was inspired by HyperCard (and called the Java compiler he wrote at Sun to dynamically compile scripts), and Danny Goodman wrote the book on Bongo! (He also wrote the book on HyperCard.) Arthur's working at Apple, now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
https://books.google.nl/books?id=NToEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...
I've included links to a bunch of brochures, articles, product info, documentation, and SimCity README and manual at the end of the article. Here's the link to the HyperLook product info, which summarizes it pretty well, and the HyperLook SimCity manual, which has a lot of screen snapshots and shows what it can do.
HyperLook Product Info:
http://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-Product-Info.pdf
HyperLook SimCity Manual:
https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLook-SimCity-Manual.pdf
Also here's an illustrated transcript of a HyperLook SimCity demo (that shows all kinds of other HyperLook and NeWS stuff too, and includes a link to the original video):
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc...
Imagine a window manager built on top of something like HyperLook, where users can not only edit the "chrome" in the window frames to make them look and behave any way they prefer, but also compose custom task-oriented interfaces by copying and pasting components from different parts of the same app, or even different apps, and integrating them by scripting, so you don't have to flip between different windows and navigate to different parts of multiple apps, and you just have all the controls you need together in one place, without any unnecessary junk. For example, SimCity came with an audio mixing server that other apps could use by sending messages to it, which would be mixed with SimCity's sounds, so you could make a button that went "PING" whenever you pressed it, then copy and paste it into any other HyperLook stack, and it would work! Or you could make a custom "SimCity Surveillance" window by copying three different map views into the same window:
https://miro.medium.com/max/556/0*XknyNX0FMotAR7y_.gif
>The neat thing is that this view here itself is just another user interface component, and I can copy and paste that, and have multiple views. Each one of these animated scrolling SimCity editors, once I’ve made one, I can put them anywhere. This window, you can click here to get three of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff
Arthur later went on to Sun, wrote the Java compiler in Java, developed the AWT user interface toolkit, then formed Marimba with Kim Polesi and Jonathan Payne and others from the original Java team, where they developed Castanet and Bongo.
https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/
>1996-11-01: Tuning in to Marimba. Kim Polese wants you to upgrade your HTML-based browser to a more interactive, more TV-like, Java-based "tuner" by the name of Castanet.
>Marimba's first product, scheduled to be announced in early October, is the punnily named Castanet, which aims to push Java toward its full potential. Java was created to deliver interactive content over distributed networks, and its much-hyped arrival last year promised to completely change the way information and entertainment are delivered electronically. The first popular Java programs have been based on HTML - for example, the Java applets that lend some animation to boring Web pages. But Java doesn't need the Web to fly. It was designed to communicate over any kind of decentralized system. [...]
Marimba developed Bongo, a Java-based gui toolkit / user interface editor / graphical environment, inspired by HyperCard (and HyperLook), which they used to develop and distribute interactive user interfaces over Castanet.
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo, By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and "live code" at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can't hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.
Danny Goodman, who wrote the book on HyperCard, also wrote a book about Bongo. Arthur later founded Flipboard and JauntVR, and now works at Apple.
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
I've written lots more about HyperLook, NeWS and SimCity:
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19837817
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18314265
For the rest of the civilized world, Arthur van Hoff wrote "PdB", an object oriented PostScript => C compiler.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088193
>Arthur van Hoff wrote PdB, and we used it for to develop HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS nee GoodNeWS). You could actually subclass PostScript classes in C, and vice-verse!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29964271
>That's interesting! I love Forth, but I love PostScript even more, because it's so much like Lisp. What is it about PostScript that you dislike, that doesn't bother you about Forth?
>Arthur van Hoff wrote "PdB" for people who prefer object oriented C syntax to PostScript. I wrote some PdB code for HyperLook, although I preferred writing directly in PostScript.
Leigh Klotz used PdB at Xerox PARC, and wrote this about it here:
https://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247#comment-18269
>OK, I think I’ve written more PostScript by hand than Jamie, so I assume he thinks I’m not reading this. Back in the old days, I designed a system that used incredible amounts of PostScript. One thing that made it easier for us was a C-like syntax to PS compiler, done by a fellow at the Turning Institute. We licensed it and used it heavily, and I extended it a bit to be able to handle uneven stack-armed IF, and added varieties of inheritance. The project was called PdB and eventually it folded, and the author left and went to First Person Software, where he wrote a very similar language syntax for something called Oak, and it compiled to bytecodes instead of PostScript. Oak got renamed Java.
Syntactic Extensions to PdB to Support TNT Classing Mechanisms:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/PdB.txt
Most of the built-in HyperLook components were written in C with PdB.
I wrote HyperLook wrapper components around TNT 2.0 (The NeWS Toolkit) objects like pie menus, Open Look menus, sliders, scrolling lists, buttons, etc. I used them in the HyperLook edition of SimCity, which you can see in this screen snapshot:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLook-...
Arthur later went on to join Sun (James Gosling's "First Person" group), wrote the Java compiler in Java, and AWT, then left Sun to form Marimba, where they developed "Castanet" (push code and content distribution), and Bongo (HyperCard/HyperLook for Java, with a WYSIWYG UI editor and script editor, that dynamically ran the Java compiler to compile and hot patch scripts attached to objects on the fly. Which was groundbreaking at the time, though IDEs do it all the time now).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434613
>Bongo is to Java+HyperCard as HyperLook is to PostScript+HyperCard.
Danny Goodman himself (the HyperCard book author) wrote a book about Bongo! Arthur's Forward explains it well.
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...
https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good
>Foreward
>Marimba was formed in early 1996 by four members of the team that created Java. Kim Polese, Jonathan Payne, Sami Shaio, and I left Sun Microsystems and founded Marimba with the goal to build commercial consumer applications written entirely in Java.
>While at Sun we concentrated on creating a great multi-platform, portable, efficient, object-oriented, multi-threaded, and buzzword-compliant language. However, we paid too little attention to developing tools. In early 1996 Java was largely still a language for skilled programmers who are happy with emacs, a Java compiler, and lots of coffee. Luckily these so-called "Rambo" programmers loved Java and made it very successful.
>Creating large applications in Java turned out to be much harder than we had anticipated, so we decided that we needed better tools before we could build better applications. That is why we created Bongo. Bongo is a tool that allows you to quickly create a user interface using a variety of widgets, images, audio, and animation. After you have created a user interface you can script it in Java, or you can easily hook it up to a Java program.
>Bongo is a high-level tool that provides a clean separation of semantics and design elements.
>It allows multi-disciplinary teams to work simultaneously on a large application without getting in each other's hair. You will find that it is a very powerful tool that is great for creating good-looking, functional, but still very flexible user interfaces. In addition to the standard widgets, Bongo enables you to extend the widget set by creating new widget classes in Java.
>This means that you can develop your own set of widgets which are easily integrated into user interfaces developed with Bongo.
>One of the great features of Bongo is its capability to incorporate applets into user interfaces.
>This enables you to use applet creation tools from third-party software vendors to create components of your user interface and combine these components into a single consistent application using Bongo. This is the way of the future: In future releases, Bongo will naturally support Sun's JavaBeans which will further simplify the process of integrating components created by different tools. This way, you can choose the tools that are appropriate for the job, rather than being stuck with the tools provided by the environment.
>A lot of the ideas behind Bongo are based on a tool called Hyper NeWS which I developed for the NeWS windows system during the late '80s (NeWS was another brain-child of Sun's James Gosling). HyperNeWS used the stack, background, and card model which was popularized by Apple's HyperCard. Bongo goes a lot further than HyperNeWS by allowing arbitrary container hierarchies and scripting.
>I am really excited that Danny has written this excellent book on Bongo. It clearly explains the concepts behind Bongo, and it takes you through many examples step by step. This book is an essential tool for all serious Bongo users.
>Have fun, Arthur van Hoff, Chief Tenology Officer, Marimba, Inc.