Re: [Fresco-devel] picogui

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 04:46:47PM -0500, Sean Rae wrote:
[snip]
> They make it sound like, except for the PDA-friendly nature of PicoGUI,
> the only thing that they have superior to Fresco (thinking along the lines
> of Fresco's goals) is their "theme interpreter".

Well, and PicoGUI is actually useful for real apps, too :-)

A major difference is that PicoGUI cares much less about generality.
If you look at their protocol, they for instance hardcode all possible
widget types:

Table E-1. PG_WIDGET values
PG_WIDGET_TOOLBAR    0
PG_WIDGET_LABEL      1
PG_WIDGET_SCROLL     2
PG_WIDGET_INDICATOR  3
PG_WIDGET_BUTTON     5
...
(from http://picogui.org/doc/pgui-protocol/pgui-protocol.html)

>                                                  It looks like some sort
> of XML description of a UI, which tastes like an MVC paradigm enforced on
> the application developers.  Sounds neat.  I wonder if the UIML I
> mentioned a few months back could substitute for this feature...

Yeah, this stuff sounds nifty; I've been meaning to read up on it
more.

One thing that occurred to me is that since PicoGUI seems to have such
a similiar architecture, but is strictly less ambitious in a number of
ways, it'd probably be possible to write a PicoGUI->Fresco translator
that let PicoGUI apps run natively... or just teach the Fresco server
how to speak the PicoGUI protocol :-).

[snip]
> Now, if only I had time to look through some code and do more than
> speculate... ;)

Yeah, I've been meaning to do the same :-)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
In mathematics, it's not enough to read the words
you have to hear the music

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