From: Avi Bryant <avi@...4.com>
Date: 2001-01-20T16:34:42+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:9585] Re: glade-ruby


On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:

> Never having used it, can I ask a stupid question?� Glade seems bound
> to Gtk: you use Gtk widget class names in the XML, for example.
> 
> If we were doing this work, is there any way of putting an additional
> layer of abstraction on top of this, so we could use the same .xml
> files, but use them to drive different toolkits (such as FOX or Qt)?

The glade file format is extremely bound to Gtk; not only in terms of
classnames, layout mechanisms, etc, etc, but also that the whole
"signal" system is somewhat unique to gtk - it may map to similar concepts
in other toolkits, but not near closely enough to effectively reuse the
files.

But even if it were more technically feasible, I'm not convinced an
abstraction at that level would be useful.  I find graphic toolkits very
idiomatic things, and good design for one UI paradigm may be very awkward
in another; I think an interface design is always going to need to be
geared towards the context (OS, toolkit, domain) it is intended for, to a
much greater level of detail than a cross-toolkit description could
provide.

However: most of the work I do with graphic interfaces is at a much more
abstract level, and I think some very interesting work could be done
there.  In Objective-C, I've developed a sort of adhoc meta-toolkit (or
something) to keep an object graph in sync with (in this case) a gtk
interface.  For the stuff I'm doing, it's rarely necessary to go down to
the level of actually interacting with widgets, and so it could in theory
be based on any toolkit (although a good interface builder like glade, and
a way to load the interface dynamically like libglade, is essential).

avi