Re: Making UI creation easier?

At 05:02 AM 11/18/2004, Larry W. Virden wrote:
>Please excuse this 'heresy', but this is a topic that comes up from
>time to time on various tcl/tk mailing lists/usenet newsgroups.
>Most people who have been doing guis for some time indicate they find
>coding the gui's directly in tcl/tk (which could be done using that
>other perl tk interface module), goes more quickly than trying to
>use various gui builders or writing intermediate languages, etc.

Yes I agree with you on this when it comes to programing tk gui's myself. But
when a non-tk programmer needs to add to the gui then we get into problems.
Currently we have a in-house tool that interfaces with several vendor 
tools. Each vendor tool
has its own perl client that is manipulated via options in a client 
notebook page. So if the engineer
that owns a client needs to add/remove or change options he would have to 
come to me
to change the perl code for his/her notebook since most of them don't know 
tk.  What we have
developed is a class that uses an option file to dynamically building the 
widgets for their notebooks.
Basically we just provide them with a description of what widgets we 
support and how to put together
a setup file and let them go. If they need a new widget we just add some 
code to our option class
and show them how to build the setup file for it. So this reduces 
maintenance for me since they can change their
notebook page just by changing setup file, no perl/tk knowledge necessary. 
Nice thing is a new vendor
tool can be added very quickly as engineer only needs to focus on writing 
the client code and adding a new
setup file. So there is merit having perl/tk generated by other means. 
Currently we don't use XML format
but I have playing around with the idea to convert over to using it. 
Currently we use a hash format and just read
the file in.

Just my $.02

Mike



>--
>Tcl - The glue of a new generation.  <URL: http://wiki.tcl.tk/ >
>Larry W. Virden <mailto:[email protected]> <URL: 
>http://www.purl.org/NET/lvirden/>
>Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting should
>be construed as representing my employer's opinions.
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