Re: GUI library - another one
It is never a bad thing when someone is interested in donating their time to develop software to share with the world, and if there is a community of developers here with the time and motivation to develop a full featured GUI library that rises to the high standards of Boost that would be a wonderful thing. That said a GUI library is a *HUGE* undertaking and other cross platform libraries like wxWidgets have a big head start. Not that this is a race or anything but when it comes to GUI libraries, features nearly always trump form. After all an awkward interface is a developer annoyance, whereas a missing feature can be a show stopper. There is a certain allure to clean slate designs and there may very well be no existing open source user interface projects that you would consider worthy of your time, but I wondered if you have considered any slightly less ambitious alternatives such as creating a framework employing components from an existing open source project? It seems to me that the promise of open source development is not served when wheels (or widgets) need to be reinvented over and over again.
Jesse Booher wrote:
There is a certain allure to clean slate designs and there may very well be no existing open source user interface projects that you would consider worthy of your time, but I wondered if you have considered any slightly less ambitious alternatives such as creating a framework employing components from an existing open source project? It seems to me that the promise of open source development is not served when wheels (or widgets) need to be reinvented over and over again.
What we do at Boost is not open source development in the usual sense. One of our goals is to produce standard library proposals with reference implementations and present them to the committee for consideration. In such a proposal, the single most important thing is the specification, because that's what goes in the standard. Preparing a standard library proposal based on an existing open source implementation isn't necessarily going to be much easier, even if it were a good idea. It's better to get the fundamentals right, because we'll be stuck with them for five+ years, at least.
Jesse Booher wrote: [...]
That said a GUI library is a *HUGE* undertaking and other cross platform libraries like wxWidgets have a big head start. Not that this is a race or anything but when it comes to GUI libraries, features nearly always trump form. After all an awkward interface is a developer annoyance, whereas a missing feature can be a show stopper.
Moreover no GUI framework could make it nowadays without an IDE. How would that fit within the Boost concept?
There is a certain allure to clean slate designs and there may very well be no existing open source user interface projects that you would consider worthy of your time, but I wondered if you have considered any slightly less ambitious alternatives such as creating a framework employing components from an existing open source project? It seems to me that the promise of open source development is not served when wheels (or widgets) need to be reinvented over and over again.
An even better option would be to concentrate on the programatic interface between GUI specific code and the heart of the application. I'm thinking of a library that standardizes how standard C++ code interacts with GUI libraries. To give an example, such a library would deal with editable text fields by providing hooks for validation and for conversion to and from the underlying framework text format, and a standard signal to notify change, rather than deal with colour and position. This is an area where all the GUI frameworks I dealt with are really lacking and a similar effort would help reduce the amount of framework specific code and support a better structured approach. Cheers, Nicola Musatti
participants (3)
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Jesse Booher -
Nicola Musatti -
Peter Dimov