David Turner wrote:
Hello
It seems that the idea of adding a medium-complexity GUI library to boost is popular, but that there are widely varying opinions on how it should be done.
I've written a first draft of a library that fulfils most of my expectations. It's available at http://www.turn.co.za/david/gui. It supports two platforms (Win32 and GTK2), and four user interface elements or widgets (window, label, button, text-entry). The design is such that it is extremely easy to support new platforms or widgets.
These are my expectations of how a good C++ GUI library should behave:
1. It should be a consistent yet thin wrapper around the platform's native functionality. 2. It should degrade gracefully in the absence of certain features on the platform. 3. It should be extensible through the factory pattern. 4. It should couple loosely with user code - this means no inheriting from an abstract Window class. 5. It should do what the user (programmer) expects, whenever possible (i.e. no leaky metaphors). 6. Widgets that contain things should behave like containers, whenever this is practical. 7. It should not use device-specific units like pixels, wherever this is practical.
and finally
8. It should be extremely easy to use.
The library at the link above fulfils most of these requirements. But it's not perfect. There are some interesting design choices.
In many respects the most difficult design work is still to be done (list boxes, menus, drawing areas). However, the code that exists has the great advantage of working.
I'd like to know what the boost community thinks before proceeding.
Not to start any religious war here, but gtk is based on C. If I was going to start a new effort, I'd certainly prefer Qt/kde, which is c++ based as a starting point.