Boost logo

Boost :

From: Max Motovilov (max_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-03-03 16:05:08


"Peter Dimov" <pdimov_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:038301c40150$3f870040$1d00a8c0_at_pdimov2...

> Not a problem. You can always serialize your widget and capture its
current
> state into XML.

Looks to me like this is all about tradeoffs. A runtime UI data repository
(DOM-based, perhaps) simplifies widgets (well maybe not, it is all a matter
of the right wrapping of the interfaces after all - what is easier, writing
marshalling code or using property mechanism to expose your essential data?)
and promotes flexibility: with serialization-based approach your RAD tool
may have to re-create all or large part of application's windows every time
a change is made, same applies to user-customizable UI elements (menu
editing, stylesheets etc.). Also, the ID tag example may be extended to
allow XPointer/XPath addressing at which point you'll have to give up the
serialization approach for sure :)

On the other hand, XML marshalling is much more lightweight, it may not even
require a DOM parser (you'll still want an XSLT engine to support
stylesheets, but at least this way you can invoke it in a child process).
For a Boost library this is a big advantage since we'll have to provide a
DOM parser as part of Boost otherwise.

In fact, compiling XML to source code provides another benefit aside from
C++ code embedding: it can be implemented fully outside of the library. You
can pretty much generate C++ code with XSLT and with good library
primitives/syntax the actual "compiler" may turn out to be small enough to
be easily customizable by users. And this way we are not tied to a specific
engine either because XML parsing is never even required at run time.

It just so happens that in _my_ mind the benefits of DOM outweigh the
liabilities. Therefore I am rather skeptical about adding a GUI library to
Boost: one compact enough to be there will not be enough things to enough
people to get wide acceptance. Yet I'd be glad to participate in
design/development of an open source GUI library that would promise to
significantly improve upon the likes of Qt.

...Max...


Boost list run by bdawes at acm.org, gregod at cs.rpi.edu, cpdaniel at pacbell.net, john at johnmaddock.co.uk