Re: Design Considerations...

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

ok, there's lots of stuff to comment on, but i'll keep my comments
to a minimum currently, picking only those points that have (partly)
been adressed already or are being currently adressed.


On Mon, 10 Jul 2000 Suboner@aol.com wrote:

> But I believe I am side tracking from this a bit. I'm currently working on a 
> simplified GUI builder (and eventually I'm hoping more simpler way to 
> construct *complete* applications like legos, and create objects as needed) 

have you had a look at GLE?
it's in gnome cvs, cvs checkout gle, read its README then install.
it lets you not only inpect widget trees of arbitrary applcations,
but also modify them and already started out providing means for
runtime alterable signal connections. unfortunately, i don't really
have the time to maintain it regularly.

> more simplified then GLADE but I noticed that Gtk is not quite up to the 
> needs of this quite yet. If you examine GLADE you will see that GLADE has to 
> be aware of all the kind of objects in which it must deal with, for example 
> replacing children widgets requires GLADE to know what type of container an 
> objects parent is, the object itself should know how to handle and replace 
> its children more so then GLADE. Another thing to look at is that GLADE has 

GLE doesn't really do that kind of special casing, for 1.2.x, it uses gtk's
argument support. unfortunately, that hasn't been applied to all widgets
yet.

> to know what type of object you want it to create, because some objects will 
> cause page faults if you simply tell it to create an object with no knowledge 
> of the objects initial parameters (GtkScrolledWindow and GtkViewport seem to 
> be the ones to do this), objects when created should assume that they were 
> created intially with out any more input. The other thing is type utilities, 
> such as registering and initializing types so that all types can be 
> initialized automaticly (and it should work both ways in that creation of an 
> object registers its type), and another usefull utility that is partially 
> there is browsing the type hierarchy, or else its assumed that the only types 
> are from "void" to "GtkObject" and their children. There should also be extra 
> type information (as needed) for getting min and max values and for getting 
> Enum value names.

right, enum and flag value names are already queryable, GLE uses that.
for 1.3/2.0 we have GParamSpec in GObject that comes with MIN/MAX etc.
it currently isn't used in gtk itself, due to shear lack of man power,
if you want to look at working example code, check out http://beast.gtk.org,
it auto-generates 90% of its GUI through property specifications (i.e.
GParamSpec).


---
ciaoTJ