[boost] Re: boost Windowing Toolkit

From: Greg Colvin (gcolvin_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-12-14 09:26:14

From: Dietmar Kuehl <dietmar.kuehl_at_[hidden]>
> there seems to be a consensus that Boost should not do a
> windowing toolkit.

That's a bit strong.  There is a lot of skepticism, but if anyone
can do it well enough to bother it's Dave.

> 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 :-)

I'll repeat my criteria:

At the API level, a set of abstractions that would make it remarkably easy
and fun to do GUI programming.

At the system level, some way to make it remarkable easy to make and
maintain ports to many underlying drawing and windowing systems.