I also agree that using MVC pattern for more complex controls like tables and trees is a good thing because of its flexibility. On the other hand there are situations where you only need to fill the control with data and present it to the user. In such case using MVC would mean redundant typying. So I would take inspiration from Qt here. For example for a tree widget, there are two options: QTreeView which has MVC interface and then QTreeWidget which inherits from QTreeView, plugs default model and adds some easy interface for adding items etc. +1 for the named parameter interface which you introduced Another very important aspect is layouting the controls. I think this is so important feature it should be thought over in the beginning (now). I have seen your examples and I saw you simply set position and size for each widget. This is nice but it simply doesn't work for real applications from 2 reasons: - it's much simpler to set size constraints for widgets like maximum size, stretching factor, borders and then let the layout system to position and size widgets automatically than do the calculations and repositioning yourself when something changes (like when user resizes the dialog) - if I understand it correctly your gui can be used to write multiplatform code. Like one code for windows and linux version of the app. But on every platform the sizes of individual widgets are different, the default fonts are different and you certainly don't want to be bothered with this. For the start something like vertical/horizontal layout would be sufficient It would be interesting to have an option to be be able to load GUI definition from xml file. It would enable using GUI designers which save time and also make code compile faster. But I understand it's too early for such functionality.