Re: Making UI creation easier?

--- Dean Arnold <[email protected]> wrote:
> For Ala:
> 
> At the risk of starting flames, unless your XML
> schema
> conforms to some sort of "standard" (e.g., XUL),
> doesn't
> it run the risk of being just as "arbitrary" as
> just dumping Perl/Tk code ?

Yes and no. I don't know what XUL is, but googling
cleared that up.

As I mentioned in my reply, XML is much easier to
parse by a program than Perl code. Various XML modules
on CPAN will do the trick. So, dumping a project in
XML format makes it easy to load later on. It is also
much easier to generate syntactically valid XML by a
program. Again, the same CPAN modules can do that.

So, theoretically, we can have a stand-alone script
(could be part of ZooZ, but doesn't have to be) that
converts such XML project files into full-fledged
stand-alone Perl/Tk scripts. We can then have helper
applications (such as ZooZ) generate those XML files.
As a bonus, if all such helper programs conform to the
same standard, then a project generated by any one can
be loaded into, and modified by, the others.

So, a standard is necessary for it to be more useful
than my current approach.

> On the other hand, Mssr. Rezic seems adept at
> generating
> XSLT's  to convert SVG to Perl/Tk code, so maybe
> there's some merit...perhaps modifying Zooz to
> generate
> XUL, and then get Slaven to write you a nice XSLT to
> generate
> the Perl (sorry, I'm being evil >8^). Voila, you get
> a dual
> purpose GUI builder (I vaguely recall a SourceForge
> project started to process XUL via Perl, but can't
> seem
> to find the link now...)

I don't know much about XSLT and SVGs to comment much
on this, but I trust Slaven. If he comes up with any
kind of standard that seems reasonable, I'm more than
willing to adapt ZooZ to it.

See .. no flames :)

--Ala



		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free! 
http://my.yahoo.com 
 

-++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==
This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list
server.  If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the
message body of "unsubscribe ptk" to [email protected]