RE: [boost] GUI sublanguage ?

From: Marshall Clow (marshall_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-06 16:24:32

At 3:28 PM -0500 8/6/03, Brock Peabody wrote:
>Because for a pretty large number of applications you can really
>simplify your code a lot by relying on the GUI system to 'do the right
>thing':
>
>    using boost::gui;
>
>    void my_action() {...}
>    void progress_action(int tick) {...}
>
>    gui::show( "sample boost application",
>               column ( button ("click it", &my_action),
>                        progress (100, &progress_action)));
>

Adobe has a tool called ADM - Adobe Dialog Manager, which is used in 
many of their
programs. You can see the docs for ADM in (for example) the Acrobat SDK, since
you can use ADM when writing plugins for Acrobat.

In ADM, you define your dialogs in a text-based format, giving 
control types, sizes,
and text, and ADM lays out the dialogs, and passes information back 
to you based on
what the user does.

The big advantage here is that all the layout "smarts" are in one 
place, and they match
the IU guidelines of the platform that the program is running on.

The disadvantage is that if you want to do something that is not 
supported by ADM,
you have to call the platform APIs, and your portability is shot.
-- 
-- Marshall
Marshall Clow     Idio Software   <mailto:marshall_at_[hidden]>
Hey! Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot?