Re: New 'GObject' as base for GtkObject?

[Elliott Hughes <Elliott Hughes genedata com>]

Havoc wrote:
> Furthermore IIRC Smalltalk is not much newer than X and already had
> most of the "modern" OO GUI ideas you are talking about. They are not
> new and not a big revelation to anyone here.

So where's the MVC architecture then? Why is it that the drag and drop
API, for example, makes it very difficult to even use MVC in our own
widgets (see my question of a few weeks ago; I haven't worked out how
to work around this)? Why is it that the widget design is every bit as
bad as the various Xt widget sets? (I'll grant you that the box layout
widgets work very well, and that I can't think of a system I prefer, but
the rest leaves a great deal to be desired.)

Why do we spend so much time poking about with fields? This is particularly
ironic given the propensity for amassing huge widget APIs that one sees
all through GTK+.

> Moreover once you get
> past syntactic issues and look at functionality GTK+ is much more in
> the rich-dynamic-object-system spirit of Java and Smalltalk than most
> "modern" C++ toolkits are.

That you consider Java to be a "rich-dynamic-object-system" in the
spirit of Smalltalk says a lot. Not wanting to support Bill Huey, with
whom I do not side, this does leave me wondering how much research
has actually been done.

As for "write your own toolkit", we're not all employed to write library
code. As for "use one of the others", I at least am not saying that any
other _directly comparable_ toolkit is superior. I don't think C is the
right language, but I don't see that Linux developers have much choice.
That said, taking advantage of an MVC style (I would probably lean
more towards a Swing-style coupling of view and controller), or at
least designing other APIs with this in mind, would be a great step
forward.

-- 
"We must be our own, before we can be another's."
	-- Ralph Waldo Emerson