[boost] Re: GUI sublanguage ?

From: nimaca2001\_at_[hidden]
Date: 2003-08-07 02:08:38

> 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.

After having followed this thread I wander if we are trying to reinvent 
the wheel. By googling a bit one can find plenty of "Gui Toolkits" and
here I saw little of them. Not a word on Qt, for example. I never 
used it for an important project but they give a (good ?) solution for 
example to the layout issues discussed so far.
If I should criticize them (as a lazy user who is in troble finding
his way among all those features) if the fact that there are huge 
classes that probably need further decomposition of resposibilities.

Anyway Qt make life simple for simple apps and provides something
that scales quite well for larger projects (I haven't used it but 
I can use KDE as witness).

So I would like to have a clearer idea of the difference between
the goal of this thread and existing solutions (i.e. Qt).

  regards