From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-08-08T16:26:36+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] GUI's and the Rouge, Part IV

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Sawyer" <transami@transami.net>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 2:15 AM
Subject: Re: [OT] GUI's and the Rouge, Part IV


> On Wed, 2002-08-07 at 20:25, Lyle Johnson wrote:
> > Could you maybe defer the construction of the actual FOX widget until
it's
> > added to a parent (or however it is in GUtopIa that you associate child
> > widgets with parent containers)? I'm not familiar enough with the
GUtopIa
> > architecture to know if this is doable or not.
>
> i thought about this, breifly. i will consider it some more.
>
> quick example on how children are assoc. to parents:
>
>   abutton = GUtopIa::Button.new
>
>   awindow = GUtopIa::Window.new
>   awindow.body = [ [ abutton ] ]
>
> so as you can see from this, the button needs to have some sort of
> existence prior to being told were it will show up. we have done it this
> way to allow for greater flexibility with regards to layout definition
> (ie. in the example above GUtopIa knows this is a grid layout b/c of the
> double array structure of body) and also for the ability to easily and
> dynamically reassign widget locations. (in fox you do this with the
> reparent method)
>
> so i hesitate to adjust the way GUtopIa handles this, just for fox's
> sake. the "foo" window may be a kludge, but it seems to work okay --i
> don't see any problems with doing this, but perhaps there are?

I don't know if there are problems or not.

Thought I'd comment even though I don't understand the
overview that well.

If what I say is junk, just ignore it.

If you're wanting to delay instantiating the widgets, I would
say you *might* replace the widget itself with (say) an array
that contained enough information to create that widget -- the
class and any parameters to new.

  abutton = [GUtopIa::Button, any, params, we, might, need]
  awindow = GUtopIa::Window.new
  awindow.body = [ [ abutton ] ]

Code could easily tell that abutton was an array rather than a
widget, and later could do

  abutton = abutton[0].new(*abutton[1..-1]) # Now I'm a real button

Just a crazy thought. Past my bedtime here.

Hal