D - WinD and GUI Toolkit Remarks
- Mark Evans (38/38) Jul 03 2002 The WinD site says,
The WinD site says,
"WinD is not multi-platform. I've seen many multi-platform GUI
toolkits, enough to conclude that such a thing cannot be as powerful,
small, and simple to use as a class library written for one single API
native to the platform....WinD is not just a thin object-oriented layer
over WinAPI. There are some, VXCL, for example, and I would also mention
MFC here."
Partly right ("There are some") and partly wrong ("enough to conclude").
FOX is what you want.
http://www.fox-toolkit.org/goals.html
It would be tragic if D ended up a Windows-only tool. I am encouraged
by the Linux/GNU work going on with D. Note that Macs now run Unix
apps too.
Mark Evans
"FOX relies only on core system facilities, and does NOT wrap native
GUI libraries or toolkits."
"Go to the Bedrock. FOX's core facilities needed from the target system
are things like mouse/keyboard event handling, and basic graphics
facilities ... If you want to build a big building, you need to go down
to the solid bedrock. This is what FOX does."
"Thus, by using core system facilities instead of higher-level
transient API's, the impact of the underlying system's instability is
minimized."
"FOX itself relies largely on FOX base classes, and therefore a large
fraction of FOX itself is platform independent as well."
"One goal is for FOX to work with as many different compilers and
development environments as possible."
"Automatic layout is a very usuful feature in FOX. It allows automatic
placement of widgets in the desired arrangement without explicitly
placing each widget in terms of position and size. Thus, changes in
widget's contents, font, and language binding can be accomodated with
ease."
"I have evaluated several different callback mechanisms, each have
their different strengths and weaknesses....FOX's message handling
system may not be type safe, but it is very compact, allows for
run-time connectivity, is serializable, and favors component-oriented
development."
"FOX is distributed in source form under LGPL"
Jul 03 2002
andy <acoliver apache.org>
Just a carification. When I talk about Linux and D its because I'll
only be testing it on Linux in the near future, as its what I have.
Personally, my objective is to help make D as cross-platform as
possible. The GCC
compiler is available on every platform I've ever used (HP/UX, Sun,
Windows, Linux, BSD, etc) and many I've not used and probably never
will. Our approach may only test on BSD and Linux. Jan is a
BSD-aphile, and I'm thirsty for one of the new powerbooks. That doesn't
mean its only for Linux or only for BSD or only for GNU or whathave you.
Granted, I think it will run better on the platforms its tested (hint)
on, it "shouldn't" matter since we're only writing a front end, but it
will matter.
-Andy
Mark Evans wrote:
The WinD site says,
"WinD is not multi-platform. I've seen many multi-platform GUI
toolkits, enough to conclude that such a thing cannot be as powerful,
small, and simple to use as a class library written for one single API
native to the platform....WinD is not just a thin object-oriented layer
over WinAPI. There are some, VXCL, for example, and I would also mention
MFC here."
Partly right ("There are some") and partly wrong ("enough to conclude").
FOX is what you want.
http://www.fox-toolkit.org/goals.html
It would be tragic if D ended up a Windows-only tool. I am encouraged
by the Linux/GNU work going on with D. Note that Macs now run Unix
apps too.
Mark Evans
"FOX relies only on core system facilities, and does NOT wrap native
GUI libraries or toolkits."
"Go to the Bedrock. FOX's core facilities needed from the target system
are things like mouse/keyboard event handling, and basic graphics
facilities ... If you want to build a big building, you need to go down
to the solid bedrock. This is what FOX does."
"Thus, by using core system facilities instead of higher-level
transient API's, the impact of the underlying system's instability is
minimized."
"FOX itself relies largely on FOX base classes, and therefore a large
fraction of FOX itself is platform independent as well."
"One goal is for FOX to work with as many different compilers and
development environments as possible."
"Automatic layout is a very usuful feature in FOX. It allows automatic
placement of widgets in the desired arrangement without explicitly
placing each widget in terms of position and size. Thus, changes in
widget's contents, font, and language binding can be accomodated with
ease."
"I have evaluated several different callback mechanisms, each have
their different strengths and weaknesses....FOX's message handling
system may not be type safe, but it is very compact, allows for
run-time connectivity, is serializable, and favors component-oriented
development."
"FOX is distributed in source form under LGPL"
Jul 03 2002
"Mark Evans" <Mark_member pathlink.com> wrote in message news:afv6h1$20gk$1 digitaldaemon.com...It would be tragic if D ended up a Windows-only tool. I am encouraged by the Linux/GNU work going on with D. Note that Macs now run Unix apps too.There's absolutely nothing in D that is Windows-specific. But there is plenty of room for, and need for, windows specific libraries (and linux specific libraries) for D. D is designed to interface directly with the operating system APIs so that D is not married to a particular GUI (like Java is).
Jul 14 2002