RE: [gtkmm] Gtkmm or Qt?

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> From: Dr Mark H Phillips [mailto:mark austrics com au] 
> 
> On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 18:11, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > > 1. It would appear that Qt handles internationalization 
> > > support better.
> > > Now probably this would be better done as a separate 
> library??  Does
> > > one exist or is one planned?
> > 
> > What do you need exactly?
> 
> I think what we need are:
> 
> 1. Unicode support (which it appears Gtk+ 2 now provides)

Yes, this is not a problem.

> 2. Translation support, which it appears is generally provided by
> gettext in Gtk applications.

Yes, this is not a problem. Are you aware of GNOME? It is translated into
just about every wrritten language that there is.

>  I'll have to look into gettext to
> see if the licencing is compatible with our software (non-free)
> and whether it does everything we need it to.

It's not a problem.

>  (For example
> we need it to have an elementary understanding of different
> grammars so that we can create phrases on the fly using parameterized
> phrases.)

You assume that that's possible. I don't think any other library can do it.
printf() is generally used to help with this a bit, and some one wrote a C++
equivalent, called "composer", I think.

> 3. Tools to facilitate generation of translations and easy maintenance
> of several different language interfaces.

There are lots of tools. I suggest that you get in touch with the GNOME i18n
team if you are interested.
 
> > > Trolltech seem to be saying that
> > > runtime introspection allows GUIs to be generated and connected
> > > on-the-fly in a way which is impossible with a template slots and
> > > signals library. 
> > 
> > I see no great demand for it. I'm sure we could add that 
> feature if somebody
> > wanted it.
> 
> One thing I'm a bit confused about is... isn't this what libglademm
> allows?

libglademm allows visual layout of controls, including properties of those
controls. Properties can be discovered at runtime.

libglade (not libglademm) can do automatic signal connection (you enter the
name of the source code callback function in the GUI designer), but that
doesn't work with C++, because we need a specific runtime instance too.

>  Probably I'm misunderstanding what libglademm does... but
> I thought it allowed a GUI to be created at runtime. So wouldn't
> this mean that you must be able to connect signals and slots 
> at runtime too?

No, that would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be conceptually possible.

Again, I don't know of any existing examples of this kind of feature in any
other toolkit.

Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com