Portable GUI levels (was: Re: [GUI] Re: Gtk and Object I/O)

[Sengan.Baring-Gould@nsc.com]

On Sat, 25 Jan 2003 14:29:29 +0100
"Daan Leijen" <daanleijen@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> IBM's SWT or GTK directly

After a bit more research I discovered that SWT would not be suitable because it
too a thin a C layer to be useful to us.

One interesting feature of SWT is to provide native access to any widget that
exists on a given platform, but to emulate those that don't (in Java -- in our
case Haskell). This allows for quick prototyping (the GUI runs everywhere) but
also allows people to use the same library to customize their application to a
different platform later (eg Mac OS X) if they so desire. 

It avoids the least common denominator problem where only basic GUIs can be
written, and it avoids the need to rewrite your code from scratch each time
you target a new platform and need more powerful features.

Of course it pushes more work into the library.

Sengan