[boost] Re: boost Windowing Toolkit

From: Dietmar Kuehl (dietmar.kuehl_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-12-14 07:38:35

Hi,

there seems to be a consensus that Boost should not do a
windowing toolkit. Since I'm probably not going to do much
in the area of windowing toolkits I go with whatever people
think. However, I want to point that some more platform
independent interface to do basic drawing and event reception
would still be nice: Visualizing non-trivial data structures often
helps in their understanding. For example, I have created a
generic graph viewer. This works with X11 (I have no problem
at all to hack X11 using either Xlib or Xt) but I would like to
implement the basic logic independent from any platform
specific interfaces (actually, I'm using a simple interface for
most of logic which is not related to the Xt toolkit).

What I'm saying is basically this: OK, probably we won't create
a whole window system (what for anyway? This is what X11 is
for and it be more reasonable to create an X11 server on top of
some lame window interface rather than reimplementing it).
Instead of creating a windowing interface, we might still consider
creating some interfaces which can be used to implement at least
simple graphics (lines, arcs, filled polygons, etc.). Together with
some sort of event processing system, corresponding objects
could then be registered with the suitable event processing
routines of the used windowing toolkit. There are some problems
in this approach but I think it would be better than having
nothing at all.

Once we got something like this, we could do various kinds of
simple visualization. ... and start thinking more into the direction
of a windowing toolkit :-)

Just my view,
  Dietmar