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Re: Motif or GTK?




Klaus Schilling replied:
>> The question now arises for me - whether I should continue to port
>> Motif to Guile, or whether instead, I should port my applications
>> to GTK.

KS> Is it hard to provide multiple user interfaces to choose from?

I have some old plans for an abstract GUI layer that could be
implemented on top of most GUI toolkits. The idea would be that
everyone could have their own favourite toolkit, be it GTK, Motif,
OpenLook or Athena, loaded and apps written using the abstract layer
would then choose it transparently. 

I was thinking about this because I want an extremely easy-to-use GUI
toolkit, without having to worry about any details. The Modula 3 system
has a (seemingly, I have not used it) nice GUI builder (not the best
word actually) that basically takes a description of a hierarchy of
widgets and then outputs the necessary code stubs. Accidentally, it
looks quite like Scheme code, if I remember this correctly. Suppose
one translated this to guile and made use of thunks for
callbacks. Then you might do something like 

	(application 
	  (horizontal-box 
	    (label "Hello ")
	    (pushbutton "world" (lambda () (display "Hello world")))))

to get a basic example up and running. 

Having a very basic, smallest common denominator GUI toolkit would of
course carry the drawback of very little functionality, but anyone
needing more than the basics could always retort to the "real"
toolkits. 

Thoughts anyone?

	Lars

-- 
Lars Arvestad               Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computing Science
                       Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden