Re: netWindows syntax similarity to other OO GUIs

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On Friday 18 July 2003 12:49 am, Mark Anderson wrote:
> > I read that you have been inspired by the QT model - is there any
> > similarity beyond the idea?
>
> Alex has apparently been inspired by the QT signal-slot model.

Eh, I just find that it's useful and that a lot of developers grok it 
(thereby making it even more useful). There are lots of was to skin 
this cat.

> (I've ragged on him enough about that so i won't continue here.)

Heh.

> That doesn't actually relate directly to widget design or
> description.
>
> > I am asking because I wonder how difficult it might be to "port"
> > webapplications to be standalone afterwards or the other way
> > around, or use IDEs available for these kits (such as, for
> > example,
> > http://www.thekompany.com/products/blackadder/) to construct
> > scripts (which afterwards, of course, have to be changed to work
> > with JavaScript/Netwindows).
>
> There are many potential layers that might be attempted; personally
> I think the most viable and interesting is one at the level of xml
> gui declaration.

Something like glade (or an XSLT transform into glade) might be 
interesting, however the divergance in both data modeling and widget 
coverage might pose some serious difficulties. Our philosophy has 
always been to let the browser do as much for us as it can, which 
means that our widget set necessarialy doesn't cover things like text 
input areas that the browser already provides.

> At some point, I would like to see some minimal convergence between
> our inline constructors and some xml vocabulary where possible.

I also support this. I think that it should be possible for developers 
to use an XML description language, and in the worst case use XSLT to 
transform their widget declarations into inline ctors.

> There are lots of competing xml vocabularies for GUI design; a list
> of a few can be seen at the bottom of
> http://luxor-xul.sourceforge.net/
>
> Part of the challenge of course is how to relate the statically
> declared elements to dynamic behavior.

This gets even more difficult when moving between a browser-hosted 
environment and a "regular" programming environment. We can take the 
JavaScript fish out of water, but keeping it alive is the real 
kicker.

- -- 
Alex Russell
[email protected]
[email protected]
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