high level application frameworkl

[Dirk Koopman <djk tobit co uk>]

For many years (about 26) I have used an "application framework" of my
own devising (in various incarnations) for separating "business
logic" [ugh] and data manipulation, completely, from visual
representation on "curses" based terminals. 

It allows programmers to say things like: take these data fields and
display them according to form xxx; then tell me if these values are
entered or those keys are pressed; I may change the contents of some
fields and redisplay others. Automatically go from field to field in an
obvious pattern (up/down, mouse click) unless I fiddle about during the
course of execution of the form.

The point of this is to allow the development of any "prettiness" of
form to be completely (and I do not exaggerate) detached from the
development of the workings of the program. The program is concerned
*only* with dealing with the logic and data, together with starting the
correct form to do any operator interaction. It does not care (nor know)
what the screen looks like. 

Fancy GUI widget drawing programs are not required.

Is there such a thing out there for Gtk-Perl or do I have to go and
write (another) one?

For the absence of any doubt at all: glade is exactly *not* what I want
or require. To do anything real seems to require far too much writing
and clicking. 

I am looking for something that is the next level up, that imposes a
discipline (and programming paradigm) on the programmer whilst allowing
flexibility (on the part of someone else) to make it all look pretty. 

So for instance: the need to process the field called 'accno' in a form
called 'show_accounts' might call back on function called 'accno' in a
perl package called 'show_accounts' (or some defined munging of those
names) and it would know to do this because the package exists and the
function is defined therein. I.e. all deeply automagical.

Potentially we are talking 10's or 100's of different forms or screens
here for large scale business systems. 

Dirk