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

Subject: Re: [boost] Thoughts for a GUI (Primitives) Library
From: Matus Chochlik (chochlik_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-10 04:50:10

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:52 AM, Alec Chapman <archapm_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Matus Chochlik wrote:
>> The Mirror reflection library (http://bit.ly/bn7iYM), does something similar
>> for input dialogs for constructing new instances of nested types with possibly
>> multiple constructors. Look for the factory generator utility in the docs. Here
>> (http://bit.ly/bqNqah) can also be found some images of gui dialogs
>> automatically generated by this lib.
>
> That looks interesting. Â Without having looked at the code, my main question is how closely is the dialog rendering tied to the reflection mechanism? Â If I'm using a class from a library that I can't modify, is there a way to make it provide the information your library needs? Â If so, it could be a useful starting point.

The factory generator is built on top of the basic compile-time reflection.
It uses the meta-data describing the class constructors to create
a factory for a particular type using application specific means of
getting input data for the constructors. This means that you can
create not only GUI-based factories but factories that can use
other data sources (a database dataset, an XML document, etc.)
There are some examples showing this here http://bit.ly/dC4fn0.
(see the mirror/example/factories/*.cpp)

The Lagoon run-time layer built on top of Mirror also allows to create
factories dynamically by using run-time polymorphism, but this
is still work-in-progress and the resulting code tends to be bloated.

The library is non-intrusive i.e. in most cases you do not need to modify
a class in order to reflect it. That is unless you want to reflect private
members that do not have public getter/setter functions. This is however
(at least in my in my experience) usually not a good practice anyway.

The classes need to be manually registered with Mirror, (http://bit.ly/bLjQFI
explains how). Besides this I'm looking for a suitable tool of automating
the registering and integrating it into the build process.

[snip]

BR

Matus