RAD, invisible components

[Stephan Bayer <stephan bayer web de>]

Ok first,
the "improvements" i will discuss are only usefull for GUI builder like
Glade.

In Tools like Borland Delphi etc. and now in Visual Studio.net there is
a partition in visual components and none visual components. In gtk and
Galde we have support for the visual part.
But in Glade is no support for none visual components (or i'm wrong),
like a database table connection or something like a socket component.
In the wide or near feature it would be nice to have such components and
this feature in Glade.
My opinion is that this is a big feature wich mainstream development
needs.

I think we have two possible solutions for this.

Solution one:
Gtk itself doesn't need this feature, but library's depending and
extending gtk maybe need this. So it would be nice if gtk includes a
class for this. Library use this class to derive from this and Glade
know that this is a none visual component. The component only needs a
property for an icon which the GUI builder display.
This solution would be the object orient way.

Solution two:
We only extend Glade.
We add the posibility to add none visual components, by declaring this
in the glade3 xml files or so.
If this mailing list comes to the solution this would be the way we
should go, i'm then inform the glade list to implement such a feature.




Stephan Bayer