(Sincerely to John Torjo - I have only skimmed the surface in win32gui. I may have a lot wrong. There may be a lot I have missed.)
There is a lot of mention of Windows stuff in the implementation. There is even
Right, on the *implementation* ;)
sdi_frame(CFrameWnd), mdi_frame(CMDIFrameWnd), WM_SIZE (et al) message etc.
The thing is that until I could provide for platform-independent events, I had to use existing windows events. If you take a look at event_ex class, you'll see that you can say things like: event_ex<wm::size>() (which can map to the underlying OS's SIZE event)
(IIRC using FrameWnd it was difficult to try to make switchable views). Anyway, in win32gui that I have looked at there is very little abstraction away from Win32 API. For example in win32gui/examples program entry is: int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
Is that so important? It's quite easy to abstract away, IMO.
AFAIK the common view on this list is not to subvert main. (VCF scores again It uses main for GUI on Windows. Despite templates win32gui seems to use much of the *patterns* in MFC like GDI , though even Microsoft has moved on with eg GDI+. There are alternatives to DeviceContext approach too but are they explored here?
I guess that's why I invented surfaces. They're in alpha-stage, but I think they're quire the way to go.
IMO To make win32gui cross-platform will require a higher level of abstraction than is there currently. For instance repeatedly the look and feel issue has come up on this list. win32gui looks to be similar to Java.awt in that it is a thin wrapper over the underlying API. However Java have now rejected that model with Swing, which does much more low level work. It would be interesting to find
Again, take a short look at surfaces. Also, we can discuss things privately, if you have more questions :)
out why the java designers felt they needed to change and made this choice. Maybe it is even possible to have both ways
On the plus side win32gui has various units for length which is commendable! I like that! In my experience units seriously do give device independence!
:) that's for surfaces
5 Must use main as an entry point. Seems trivial but affects how lightweight a GUI application is. Lightweight is good!
Again, I think that's not so complex to implement IMO. A lot of concepts I've developed for win32gui can be platform-independent. That's why I want to port this to other platforms. But I need your help. Volunteers needed :) Best, John -- John Torjo, Contributing editor, C/C++ Users Journal -- "Win32 GUI Generics" -- generics & GUI do mix, after all -- http://www.torjo.com/win32gui/surfaces.html - Sky's the limit! -- http://www.torjo.com/cb/ - Click, Build, Run!