[GUI] Re: Know you backends

[Axel Simon]

Daan, Krasimir, Wolfgang,

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 02:32:50PM +0100, Daan Leijen wrote:
> Maybe Krasimir can tell us more about the issues involved?
Uhum. I read Krasimir's email. One quick question to verify that I 
understood: The intermediate layer of Clean's Object I/O is written in C 
because it is difficult to call Clean from C?

> This actually brings me to another issue I have been wondering about.
> Why don't we use the GTK library as our portable GUI library directly?
> I may have missed some discussions about this, but if it is a really portable
> library, we can use the fruits of their labor. (Of course, it does need to
> give a native look and fool, I wonder whether GTK does that?)
Wolfgang gave a good answer to that and I am convinced that Gtk alone is 
not the answer.

> > I do not like the evolutionary approach. It will lead to an API which
> > changes a lot.
> 
> Well, we both started out as amoebes but evolutionized into beings that use
> electrical signals to exchange opinions about how to create specific patterns on
> cathode ray tubes :-)
:-) Thanks Daan! The first time I really had to laugh reading all these 
messages...

> But seriously. We are trying to create a medium-level interface. The Port
> approach is to create that using two layers: one core medium-level interface
> (Port) and a convenience layer on top of that, using abstraction, overloading
> etc (GIO/Htoolkit).
Ok, I'll look at Ports and especially GIO over the weekend. The syntax of 
GIO looks really clever!

[..]
> The other approach, that you are proposing, is to define just one medium
> level interface (with abstraction and all) and to implement backends for
> each platform directly. The advantage is that it probably easier to support
> more backends. The disadavantage is that you need to do more work
> for a port.
Yes, true. But I think it is not as difficult to bind to a more abstract 
layer.

You hear from me :-),

Axel.