On 18/06/2011 16:55, Artyom Beilis wrote:
Making a GUI library is not about providing nice syntactic sugar for building layout.
Syntactic sugar is the last thing that should interest you.
Having a short and concise declarative definition of your GUI has several advantages. It's easier to validate it, it allows to avoid bugs, and you can really materialize the intent of what you want instead of coding its logic directly. Moreover, writing GUIs is very tedious and uninteresting. It would be nice if it were possible to automate more things. For this reason, most Boost-related efforts for GUIs have not been to create a robust library with lots of features, but rather to provide a "better" way to make GUIs built on top of an existing widget engine. I believe the Adobe Adam&Eve project is the most popular approach for GUIs in the Boost community. The way to go may be to do a Eve-like C++ DSEL.