About wxSqueak 4rc1

[Rob Gayvert]

German Arduino wrote:

>Really I like a lot this product.
>
Thanks! I hope you'll be able to use it on your projects.

>I have been reading also your RoadMap, and I think that will by particulary
>useful the 0.8 point (a GUI Builder), but seems as a big project. What plans do
>you have about this?
>  
>
I don't have any definite plans, but I think a good GUI builder is 
absolutely essential. wxWidgets has some great raw capabilities for 
laying out windows, but hand-coding it is awful. 

One thing that is certain is that a wxSqueak GUI builder should be based 
on XRC, which is wxWidgets' standard XML-based format. The 0.4 release 
has several demos of this. The "XRC Sample" shows that you can create 
some fairly complex windows. The "XRC Viewer" shows that you can open up 
XRC files created with other tools, like wxDesigner and wxGlade. The rc 
directory in the demo distribution has a bunch of samples from these two 
tools. Not all of them work, but most do. For example, wxDesigner 
supports creating a wxGrid, but there's no support for reading a wxGrid 
in the standard XRC library.

While I plan to keep adding onto these demos while I extend the API, I 
don't expect to spend a lot of time on a GUI builder for quite some 
time. So if someone else wanted to get started on it, that would be 
great. We should discuss it here, and come up with a killer design.