[UI] Well, shall we do something then?

[Bill Schwab]

Hans-Martin,

Have you looked at Magritte?  I do not know enough about it to vouch for
it, but it seems a worthy effort (and I would expect no less given
Stef's involvement).

Re generating, I have done some work on it in Dolphin.  If you grab my
Dolphin Goodies, you will find a package called ViewGeneratorBase, or
something like that.  It is the basis for some meta-driven generators
that I use.  Some of the technology will likely remain closed, but on a
rewrite/port, there are additional parts that I would hope to open. 
Something that does not yet exist, but would if I move to Squeak, is a
converter for Dolphin views.  It should be possible to do something
similar to analyze the hierarchy of a live view, but I suspect it would
always be preferable to go back to a builder that created the view and
modify it directly.  OTOH, I have some things that analyze existing
structures and generate a builder that I then maintain after the initial
import, and that works well.

WindowBuilder was very good at analyzing existing views.  If its sources
are now open(??), it might be worth some time to see if it did anything
beyond generating code from the views.

For layout, I really like the managers that Dolphin provides.  The only
exception being that FramingLayout is a little cumbersome to use.  To
get around that, I wrote a package called Wizardry that includes an IDE
extension for the Dolphin view composer.  It adds commands for
positioning a panel over a fixed-size row of buttons that are positioned
from the left and from the right, depending on the command.  More and
better things could be done, of course.

Bill



Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
University of Florida
Department of Anesthesiology
PO Box 100254
Gainesville, FL 32610-0254

Email: bschwab at anest.ufl.edu
Tel: (352) 846-1285
FAX: (352) 392-7029

>>> hmm at heeg.de 09/16/07 5:32 PM >>>
After playing a little with seaside and its HTML rendering mechanism
(which has some similarities to ToolBuilder's) I can imagine a
combination of these things:
1. A way of specifying a GUI programmatically somewhat more similar to
the HTML rendering in seaside (i.e. more concise, better structural
nesting). Let's call it ToolBuilderToo since it would really  be a
slightly imrpoved ToolBuilder.
2. A mechanism for creating such "buildWith:" methods from existing GUIs
which may have either been created using a kind of GUI painter, or are
real live GUIs. For example, taking a live browser window, adding a
button with some function, and storing its specification would be nice.
Of course, it's entirely reasonable if this is only supported in one or
two ToolBuilderToo targets, such as Morphic and Tweak for example.
3. A more powerful layout mechanism - GUIs built with ToolBuilder are
pretty limited since it needs to cope with MVC's viewport/window
transformation ugliness which essentially forces the GUI to have only
proportionally scaled panes. I know that I have struggled with MVC and
fixed-height panes ever since I first touched a Smalltalk-80 system 20
years ago, so this might not be easy.
4. (maybe in combination with 3) Something like cascading style sheets
for specifying different layouts and colorings for GUIs. Maybe it would
even be possible to specify GUI themes using some kind of CSS?

CSS allows for some pretty decent layout, and maybe using it as the
method for specifying GUI layouts would lead to some synergy effects
between web GUI and screen GUI developments.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin
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