Re: [gsl-dev] GTK+ v FLTK

[Sander Vesik <sander_traveling yahoo co uk>]

 --- Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote: 
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 09:00:17PM +0100, Sander Vesik wrote: 
> > The problem here are users of certain not insignificant platforms - like say
> MacOSX
> > - that emand 100% correct look meaning the use of native widgets. 
> 
> Wrapper toolkit doesn't give you that. It doesn't let you use many
> more complex platform features, unless you have a way to do ad hoc
> "punch through" to platform-specific code. You can't properly support
> a platform using least-common-denominator features only.
> 

I believe some of that is needed and in the plans for macosx/winxp support 
at any rate. This may be as simple/complex as supporting a platform spellchecker if
there is a suitable one, or doing menu merging (both ways - system components in
native menus and macos style annoying finder menu).

> Note also that using the native widgets *is not* enough. You have to
> follow the platform UI guidelines - what accelerators to use, how much
> spacing to put where, when to use bold labels, button order,
> etc. Abstracting all that is basically impossible to get right.  And
> indeed Eclipse (using SWT) gets this very wrong and would be very hard
> to fix.
> 
> This is why 100% correct platform integration requires writing to
> multiple APIs. Neither an emulating nor a wrapper toolkit gives you
> 100% proper platform look-and-feel.
> 
> If you want a single API though, you have to pick one of these
> compromises. I believe that the toolkit community has repeatedly
> demonstrated that the right compromise is the emulating toolkit; all
> three major toolkits use that approach because it works. Indeed the
> Java community explicitly switched from AWT to Swing, so they
> empirically tried out both ways before deciding.
>  
> > Well... Abiword is also very much a small program, so number of
> > platforms x rewrite amount is actually small. Its not a
> > particularily scalable approach.
> 
> I don't agree; there is a structure to the way AbiWord does this, and
> it has been applied repeatedly across the many pieces of AbiWord.
> There's no reason to believe that the percentage won't remain the same
> as AbiWord gets larger - it's remained the same for quite some time
> and AbiWord has been growing. AbiWord is not as huge as OpenOffice,
> but neither is it tiny.
> 
> The approach AbiWord uses was driven by the original AbiSource guys
> who were I believe veterans of a web browser project (Spyglass or
> something?) that also used it. They had a clear proven strategy for
> cross-platform and I think it's a good one, if you want to be
> uncompromising.
> 

Yes - but this is not about writing a new Office suite from scratch while 
trying to see if there are salvageable pieces in the old, or at least thats
not the impression I have got so far.

> > > The idea of a "wrapper" or "multi-platform" toolkit is tempting but
> > > it's a pipe dream IMO. It isn't even possible for many of the more
> > > complex widgets - SWT for example uses emulation for tree and text
> > > controls, because wrapping those doesn't work out well.
> > > 
> > 
> > I'm not sure to what extent this is a problem - no toolkit provides
> > anything even resembling what you need as the main 'work' area in
> > writer, calc or draw. POssibly a sufficently generic table widget
> > could be used in some of teh database dialogs and simlar
> 
> The main "work" area is going to be a custom widget, as it also is in
> AbiWord, Gnumeric, gpdf, whatever. How to implement that is pretty
> much orthogonal to the toolkit you use.
> 
> If toolkits contained a "word processor" widget and a "spreadsheet"
> widget writing those apps would be pretty easy. ;-) 
> 
> So this needs to be separated out. The toolkit decision should be
> about how you want to do menubars and dialogs. The drawing API
> decision should be orthogonal, and based on how you want to implement
> your large core-functionality custom widgets.
>  
> If you entangle these two issues you'll probably end up with a mess.
> 
> Havoc 

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