[gtk-list] Re: Question: Philosophy of saving widget state

[andrew cogent ca]

Klaus Bernpaintner writes:

 > The java language has a nice "Serializable" interface that takes
 > care of these kind of things. When you serialize an object, you
 > save the object and everything it contains and points to
 > (recursively) so that objects and their state can easily be
 > restored by "unserializing". Every class implements this interface
 > so it is automatically taken care of and you don't have to think at
 > all. Don't know if this would be possible (or even desirable) in
 > GTk+ . But it is handy, and extensively used with java
 > GUI-builders.

That would be good.  It implies that all of the state information is
available to the implementor of the Serializable interface for a given
class.  This is the crux of the matter with GTK.  Before you can
serialize an object, you must have a consistent way of querying the
information that governs its look and layout, and a *matching* way of
writing that information back to the object to recreate the look and
layout.

Andrew