Re: Phil meet y-devel; y-devel meet Phil

Hi,

Apologies for the top posting, but having only just subscribed I've not
figured out how to get mailman to mail me archieves to which I can reply
so I'm pasting from the web interface, which doesn't give me the
Message-id[0].

Quoting Phil who was at the time quoting Phil:
> > Get a list of every known widget on the face of the earth, and use it
> > to:
> > * work out the simplest set of primitives required to make it possible
> > to build every widget
> > * work out which [widgets] need to be implemented for v1.0
> 
> These are hard.  Getting the list probably involves trawling the docs on
> msdn, adc, motif, qt, gtk, et al.

This has already been done at least 3 times for Java so whilst you may
or may not hate Java, the easiest solution is to look at the widgets
they've implemented there.

Firstly, AWT roughly has the lowest common subset of widgets supported by
all platforms Java runs on. So you don't get Tree widget (and others).
This set may be what you want to look at for version 1.0. Or, look at
older OS widget sets. AmigaOS, RISC OS etc all have quite simple widget
sets which may be adequate for version 1.0.

Secondly, Swing (whilst foul in (almost[1]) every possible way) emulates a
very rich set of widgets. This probably has more than enough widgets for
everything you need. I think the number of widgets Swing has is at least
equal to Qt.

Thirdly, SWT uses native widgets where possible and only emulates (ala
Swing) where necessary, so is fast and native. This has slightly fewer
widgets than Swing but basically almost everything in GTK+/Motif/Windows
is there in some form.

Matthew

[0] Though a good mail client will probably fall back to threading on
      subject line only.
[1] It actually implements MVQ very nicely - better than SWT does.
-- 
Matthew Sackman

BOFH excuse #45:
virus attack, luser responsible