Glade - Suggestions

[Mark Probst <schani unix cslab tuwien ac at>]

hi

first of all:

thanks for glade, damon. it's very promising.

now for a few suggestions:

* glade should be extensible

it should be possible to easily extend glade by providing additional
widgets, along with a little bit of linkage code, which can be plugged
in at run-time, i.e. by loading a shared library.

the program using the generated interface should only need to link
against the same shared library and the widget should work.

* widget parameters

it should be possible for widgets to be customized
not only by modification of properties (title, enabled/disabled, bg color, ...)
of some predefined types (strings,
ints, colors, ...) but by allowing the widget (or the linkage code) to
specify a custom 'inspector' (itself a widget) allowing parameterization 
of the widget of almost arbitrary complexity in the easiest way (for the
user). the java beans api as well as the NeXT (now Apple) interface builder, 
for example, allow for this.

* output format

there has been some discussion going on about whether or not to use
a lisp syntax for the output file and most people seem to be against lisp,
for reasons i do not understand.

one argument went that one would have to learn lisp in order to understand
or modify the output. this is not true. do you need to known lisp in
order to modify your 'gimprc' file? certainly not. we are not talking
about actually using lisp or scheme as the output language, but about
using its syntax. if you use html-syntax, the output would not be html
either, would it?

another argument was that any application using glade-output needed to
be linked against guile. by the same token, this is not true. all one
has to incorporate is a lisp-parser, which is about the easiest thing
on earth to write.

my arguments in favor of using lisp-syntax are these:

  + the syntax is clear and easy to understand. just look at 'gimprc'
    or 'pluginrc'.

  + it is easy to implement. i'd actually say, there is not even anything
    to implement as there should be plenty of code to reuse in gimp etc.

  + gnome uses scheme as an extension language. scheme uses lisp-syntax
    (it's a lisp dialect after all). so why not use the same syntax?

but, before i get a bunch of replies/flames: the first two points
(extensibility and parameterization) are far more important to me.

bye
schani

-- 
Mark Probst
Student, Programmer
http://www.unix.cslab.tuwien.ac.at/~schani/