[boost] Re: UI++ [was: GUI sublanguage;Re: GUI/GDI templatelibrary]

From: Philippe A. Bouchard (philippe_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-08-09 19:41:15

David B. Held wrote:

[...]

> Well, honestly, I can't wrap my head around the big vision for how
> this thing is proposed to get implemented, so maybe I don't know
> what I'm talking about here.  But it seems to me that Layer 0 for
> existing GUIs could be designed in such a way that you could
> offer custom alternatives for the standard widgets that do your
> low-level visual tweaking (messing with functionality might be a bit
> much).  So if you wanted to customize the look of a button, there
> would be a Layer 0 wrapper, say, for Win32 buttons that provide
> the expected interface to Boost.GUI.  But maybe you can inherit
> from that wrapper and override some things to do your custom
> drawing, and so you still have the required Layer 0 interface that
> Boost.GUI needs, but you also get your customization of native
> controls.
>
> It seems to me that Boost.GUI could possibly provide hooks for
> such things as owner-drawn controls without cluttering up the
> interface too much, which should give you quite a bit of
> customization power.  Would that be satisfactory?

If I had more time working on this I wouldn't mind rewriting the basic
widgets because reuseing or wrapping existing ones would limit a lot the
design we aim for.  Qt's QSpinBox only accepts integer types QListBox can
only display simple labels.  I don't know about WxWindows but new styles
(Windows 200x) would take time for another LGPL group to implement.  MFC is
limited to Windows.

I agree that some deterministic automata is missing also and Direct X /
OpenGL support is interesting also.

Philippe