Re: [boost] Thoughts for a GUI (Primitives) Library

Subject: Re: [boost] Thoughts for a GUI (Primitives) Library
From: Colin Caughie (c.caughie_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-02 02:29:41

> -----Original Message-----
> From: boost-bounces_at_[hidden] [mailto:boost-
> bounces_at_[hidden]] On Behalf Of Klaim
> Sent: 02 September 2010 00:32
> To: boost_at_[hidden]
> Subject: Re: [boost] Thoughts for a GUI (Primitives) Library
>
> We had a long discussion on the french community developpez.com
> recently
> about exactly this subject.
> Most of the participants were fighting over the fact that Qt is well
> enough
> and that working with high level C++ for GUI is  not currently
> necessary.
>
> In the discussion some thought were put in a library concept (that
> was
> started after the discussion but I'm not sure about it's current
> state) and
> I remember proposing some kind of design, something similar to what
> we see
> in recent boost libraries(boost::log, boost::msm) : having the lib
> being a
> meta-library with customizable front-end and back-end.
> I don't think it's possible to build a GUI framework that is general
> enough
> for any kind of use. But I think it's possible to provide a way to
> plug a
> input-specific-strategy and an output-specific-strategy in some kind
> of
> meta-library providing ways to define controls behaviour in a
> general way,
> with possibility to use input-strategy-implementation-specific
> interface if
> required and output-strategy-implementation specific interface f
> required
> too.

The thing that would make such a library hugely useful to organizations such as ours would be if it could be adopted incrementally by developers who already have a large GUI codebase. For example we are unfortunate enough to have to maintain a very large MFC application. We can't afford to rewrite the whole thing using something else, but if we had a nice GUI library that could use MFC as a back-end, it might be a lot easier to add new features to the GUI.

The tools it could provide might include:

- a way to map MFC messages to signals (if such a thing is even possible)
- helper classes for auto-arranging controls in a dialog (which would of course be generic enough that you could use them to auto-arrange pretty much anything)
- an action system like the one in Qt

The idea would be not so much to replace MFC, Qt, wxWidgets, et al, but instead to provide a kind of unified API and helper library that supplements them.

Of course even that's not an easy task...

Colin

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