[boost] Re: GUI sublanguage ?

From: Philippe A. Bouchard (philippe_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-06 18:33:56

Bohdan wrote:

[...]

>> There are a lot of good reasons why we would not always want to have
>> total control.
>
> "Not always" means "sometimes not" ?
> According to this logic your gui language is
> layer built on top of interface proposed by me
> ... just for convenience. Right ?

I looks like a competition between the two of you...

>> I want my applications to be as simple as possible, and
>> to all look the same.
>
> Generally GUI applications are semantically complicated.
> Forget about "universal cure" from this. Everithing you can
> do is to symplify development in some cases.

It doesn't make sense to start positionning every widget manually like this.
What if you find you're interface ugly (p = 0.90) the first time and you
have found a better idea?  You are going to retype the position of every
widgets in the whole application?!?  If you are planning to do this, I
suggest to use another GUI application which will generate the spaghetti
part of you're code.

>> If the GUI library picks the 'best' settings for
>> the platform automatically, the individual programmer doesn't have to
>> think about it.  Everything just works like it should.  To take a few
>> things from your snippet that are suspect to me:
>>
>>>     w.width( 400 );
>>>     w.height( 200 )
>>
>> Where do 400 and 200 come from?  This seems arbitrary to me.  The GUI
>> system should be able to tell how to size itself.
>
> Have you invented universal algorithm for window size/position ?

It is possible to use horizontal / vertical / grid layout recursively which
will deduce the position of your widgets given your criterias.  Another
container-like widget; i.e. container oriented design.  With experience it
becomes easy.

[...]

> Generally runtime gui styles (flat, 3d ...) can be more helpful,
> because changing look-and-feel in "application options" is very
> frequent situation for serious GUI applications. Please don't be too
> obsessed by compile
> time, it is not very good way for GUI toolkit.

I agree, you should draw some line between compile-time / run-time.  Not to
much run-time though.

[...]

>> - GUI code is difficult, tedious, and error prone even for simple
>> tasks,
>> I want to make it simple (for simple tasks)
>
> Agree! But only for simple tasks.

You mean the opposite...  The time required for complex applications would
be exponential.

[...]

Philippe