* Hajo Kirchhoff <mailinglists@hajo-kirchhoff.de> [2004-12-25 05:47]:
Hi, (and merry holidays to those that celebrate them :)
- The Grid
A grid is an example of a layout manager. Generic support should be added for layout managers and allow you to add managers such as grid-layouts. Another layout is a flow layout, for example, adding
I would like to take the concept of layout managers a lot further.
Basically a layout is nothing but a particular strategy to calculate the size and position of a set of widgets. The grid layout is one of them.
Others are docking mechanisms, or autohide/unhide windows as you see them in Visual Studio for example: a window that shows itself when you hover with the mouse pointer over its tab for a while and that hides itself again when a different window gets the focus.
These too are size/position handlers. So I'd rather think along positioning strategies rather than have a 'Grid'. A Grid is too low an abstraction.
Hajo I agree, as far as positioning strategies go. Layout management can be far richer. I was not putting forward The Grid as a positioning strategy, and I think both you and Reece mistook the point of the OP. The point of the OP (me) was to lay out a taxonomy of what goes into the client window of an application. I was attemping a highest-level look at the sort of interfaces developers must regularly assemble, so that a Boost GUI library would faciliate the those tasks. My post was to note, that in common business applications repeate four different canonical UI forms in their /client/ areas, The Form, The Grid, The Document, or The Canvas. By The Grid, I'm thinking of applications like Excel, Access, or SASS, where information is presented in a tabular format. Information information is mapped to a tabular data structure, or a sparse matrix, rows and columns are added and deleted, ranges are selected, cells are referenced, etc. I'm noting that this is such a common display of data, that it should be considered as a special strategy for the client area. A grid, in this sense, is far more than just a layout. But, to address your concern directly, layout is far more than just a grid. The layout and arrament of client areas is a whole other area of discussion. Reece goes on to talk about a desire for something along JTable/TableModel, so I think we are talking about the same thing in different terms. It would be disappointing to see another library that was, like MFC or Java AWT, a whole lot of framing, but for the client area you have a set of stock widgets on the one hand, or take the pen and draw it yourself on the other. When I look at xwWindows, I see a library went from the OS, frames, widgets, and primtives, and on the way towards the application and got lost. I put forward what I thought were the four basic types of application that a library design could keep it's eyes on the prize. Also, so we can consider how to compartmentalize the library. If I'm developing a vector graphics application, I don't need a validation library, if I'm merely tracking the mouse over a grid, I don't need much in the way of hit-testing. -- Alan Gutierrez - alan@engrm.com