From: Sander Jansen <sander@...>
Date: 2004-08-04T13:46:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Free(real Free) GUI toolkits

Not impressed either.... BUT since I had nothing to do, I added to my GUI 
widget comparison page at the FOX Community wiki page.  Feel free to add or 
fix any entry's.

http://fox-toolkit.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Widget_Comparison

	Sander

On Sunday 01 August 2004 07:28 am, Lothar Scholz wrote:
> Hello David,
>
> DR> Hmm.. does anyone have a MacOSX computer they can try
> DR> out WideStudio on? I am curious to see if it is
> DR> portable to the mac.
>
> DR> WideStudio has plenty of widgets btw. I just didn't
> DR> play enough with the wsbuilder.
>
> Okay i downloaded the 100 MB Win Installer and played a bit with
> wsbuilder. I must say that this toolkit can win the second price in
> the most ugly toolkit competition (the first is for the all time
> winner FLTK). And there is no theming to change this, looking at the
> code shows me that there will be no theming for a very long time
> because the drawing code is deeply buried in the source files.
>
> I'm sure that the toolkit is more flexible, just because it uses a
> TK like approach of managing/accessing attributes by string names. Maybe
> not bad but quite different. The event procedures that simple
> functions. So writting C++ code would require extra overhead, but it
> is okay for different language bindings.
>
> The documentation seems not be on the state of a 3.1 release. It
> describes methods but not which properties are available. There seems
> to be also no real tutorial for starters.  I must say that i don't
> like FAQ like tutorials, that have a lot of "How to " titles but no
> integrated 10 min learn the basics code.
>
> From the technical point i don't like that the lib has no layout
> mangement (only Delphi like anchors), a very bad option for everybody
> who wants to do L10N. The implemented widgets are very very basic.
> As a toolkit written in Japan there are of course unicode/MBCS (?)
> handling routines. From the widget design it seems to be much much
> harder to write or adapt widgets as it is in FOX/QT. I just looked at
> the "WSClist.cpp" source code to find a place where i can overwrite
> the item draw method to use my own custom draw hook. It's not
> possible. But looking at the source code, hey man that code is ugly and
> completely comment free. Other things, radio+check buttons must always
> be grouped, so there seems to be also no good separation for
> layout/logic in the toolkit.
>
> So i think it is good that this is a dead project. Don't waste your
> time to try to work with this toolkit. After working about 8 years
> with writting GUI's i can tell you that the afford you need to bring
> this upto date (compared to GTK/QT/FOX) is too expensive and i really
> doubt that you will find so much programmers helping you.
>
> Oh yes i forgot, the WxBuilder - the GUI builder - is nothing where
> anybody want's to write larger dialogs.

-- 
"Nervous hands grip tight the knife
In the darkness, till the cake is cut"
	- Peter Gabriel